Cherry Blossoms with the Fuji XE-1 and the New Fuji Colour Profiles in Lightroom 5.4

I absolutely love Cherry Blossoms. They’re my favourite flower and I love the way they herald the start of spring and the end of the winter. I hope that sometime I will be able to visit Japan during the Cherry Blossom season, but for now I’ll have to make do with the trees around Dublin. Actually, there are quite a few around the city, especially in Stephen’s Green park in the centre of the capital.

I had taken my Fuji XE–1 with me for a walk today and I got some nice shots of the flowers beginning to bloom. I was using my 35mm lens, which while not the ideal focal length, it’s wide aperture did mean I got some nice smooth bokeh in the background. I also thought that the vibrant colours gave me an ideal opportunity to try the new colour profiles for Fujifilm cameras in the latest Lightroom release. Adobe have finally added colour profiles for all the standard picture modes that come on Fuji’s cameras, including Provia, Astia and of course Velvia. For these shots, there could be no other choice - I had to go with the Velvia !

I started by changing the colour profile to Velvia in the calibration section of Lightroom’s develop module. Even just this change alone makes a huge difference. I’ve often found that Fuji files are a bit desaturated in Lightroom, but with the profiles this problem is mostly rectified. Here’s the raw file, untouched.

Now here’s the version with the Velvia colour profile selected.

Finally I added some further enhancements using one of my Quick Lux presets. Finally I applied one of my Fuji sharpening presets (X-Trans-Sharpen-SuperSharp). Here’s the final result.

I used the same process for the rest of these examples, combining the new Velvia profiles with either Quick Vivid or Quick Trans from my Quick Lux presets and finishing off by tweaking the sharpening. The new profiles are definitely a huge improvement, and I think the results speak for themselves.

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