Last week I was travelling in Germany and I got to spend some time in the beautiful town of Heppenheim. Heppenheim is a little town about 40 minutes outside of Frankfurt and is filled with some really pretty medieval buildings. I had been there last year too and I had gotten some nice shots, but this time I was trying to do things a little differently, and so I was focussed more on the details. Images were taken with the Fuji X-Pro 2.

I'm travelling at the moment, so I haven't had a chance to do any updates on my X-Pro 2 diary series. I am actually shooting with the camera while I'm away, so I will have some more reports when I get back and have a chance to properly process my images. In the mean time, before I left, I put together a collection of my favourite shots that I've taken withe the X-Pro 2 so far.

I was doing some more shooting with the X-Pro 2 over the weekend, and It was a lovely sunny summers day. I spent a bit of time by one of my favourite places in Dublin City, the Grand canal, taking pictures and generally giving the camera a good workout. While I was mostly shooting stills, I did shoot some video with the camera too, and I have some thoughts about the process and the results.

In this latest installment of my ongoing rolling review of the Fuji X-Pro 2, I'm looking at some various observations that I've discovered while trying out the camera. I have been keeping notes as I go out with it, and so, consider this a sort of behind the scenes, un-cut version of what will become the eventual review. 

If you're looking to evaluate the X-Pro2 and you want to see how the images look for yourself, I've put together a few images as samples for you to download as raw files. I've tried to give a range of subjects, and to include some that would traditionally be tricky for certain converters.

One of my main reasons for getting an X-Pro 2, apart for the obvious one of having the camera to use, was so that I could keep my e-book guides up to date. To that end I've been doings some testing with the various different raw converters out there, and here are my preliminary findings so far.

I finally got out to do some proper shooting today, and I had a lot of fun with the X-Pro 2. I decided to focus on trying about the film modes, and even though I was shooting Raw + Jpeg, my goal was to focus on the Jpeg, and in particular the Film Simulation modes. What I was especially keen to try is the new Acros simulation. I have read a lot about it since the X-Pro 2 first came out, so I was expecting good things. I was certainly not disappointed.

After years of using my trusty little Fuji X-E1, I’ve finally decided to upgrade, and I’m now the proud owner of an X-Pro 2. In the past I have owned an X-Pro 1 but I sold it as I wasn’t happy with the camera at the time. It’s interesting to return to the larger form factor, and it’s also interesting to see how far Fuji has progressed, even since my X-E1. I want do a full review, but I also wanted to document my journey of discovery with the X-Pro 2, so I’ve decided to combine the two into a sort of rolling review, in the form of a diary.

In my recent guide for processing X-Trans images in Iridient Developer, I talked about different workflows for working with the software in conjunction with Lightroom. Specifically I discussed the alternative approaches of either finishing your images in Iridient Developer or partially processing them and finishing them in Lightroom. On a recent shoot I had the opportunity to use the latter of these two workflows and I thought I'd share the results.

When I finished writing and published my recent Iridient Developer X-Trans guide, I wanted to try and see what a print copy would look like, so I uploaded it to Blurb and ordered some copies. I got the copies in the post today, and I’m really happy with the results. The print quality is pretty good for print on demand, and the binding and cover is great. Because they came out so well, I’m making them available for sale via Blurb, so if you would prefer a print copy to the e-book then you can get that now too.

I recently wrote a guest post on the Fuji X Passion website. Fuji X Passion is a blog and soon to be an actual printed magazine for Fuji X shooters. They asked me to talk about my recent Iridient Developer X-Trans book, and so I wrote a little piece about the book, with some more details about why I wrote it, and the thought process behind it. You can see the post here.

I promised that I would release a few more excerpts from my Iridient Developer book, and I’m a little late getting around to it, so apologies. In the book I go through each of the tabs in the settings window, and explain how the various controls work, especially in relation to working with X-Trans images. The following excerpt is from the section where I discuss the detail tab, and in it I talk about how to use and understand the Iridient Reveal sharpening method.

This has been a long time coming, and it feels like I’ve been working on it for ages, but my third Fuji X-Trans guide is now finally available. This time, I’m covering Iridient Developer, and the e-book is a comprehensive guide to using the software for processing Fuji X-Trans files. I also cover some workflows for integrating Iridient Developer into a Lightroom Workflow.

Iridient Developer has received a new update this weekend. The new version adds support for compressed raw for the X-Pro 2 along with support for a number of other cameras. The update also has some important bug fixes, including a fix for some bugs in OS X. 

It seems to have been a long time since Apple has released a Raw compatibility update for OS X and I was beginning to get a bit worried, but just as I was about to start investigating the issue, a new update has just popped up in the Software Update panel of OS X. 

I am in the process of writing my third Fuji X-Trans guide. This one will be a compressive guide to working with Iridient Developer. It's actually turning out to be the biggest one of these guides yet, and I go into a good bit of detail on how to use the software, and cover workflows for working with Iridient Developer and Lightroom. However, as I've been writing this, I keep thinking about some of the questions that I often get asked by email about using one converter over another. 

Phase one have just released a new update for Capture One Pro 9. Version 9.1.1 adds partial support for the Fuji X-Pro 2. As with many of the other converters out there, it only currently supports uncompressed raw files.

Just a quick update on X-Pro 2 raw support. Another application has added support fro X-Pro 2 raw files. This time it's Mylio. If you haven't seen Mylio before, it's quite an interesting application, that has great promise. It is a photo management application, which also features some raw conversion, but it's main feature is its ability to sync across multiple platforms, including iOS.