Fire is notoriously difficult to deal with, because it covers a large dynamic range, and we have strong associations of certain colors with heat. Thus a more yellow rendering usually suits fire very well, whereas a more neutral rendering quickly looks unnatural. In particular, we seem to expect highlights to twist to yellow, and midtones to remain orange.

My editing goals for this picture are simple: raise shadows or blacks until the pan becomes faintly visible, and reign in highlights if necessary to prevent excessive clipping.

Fujifilm X-Pro2 with XF35mmF1.4 R 1/1000s f/2.2 ISO400
📂 DSCF9359.RAF (23.0 MB)

There's a difficult tradeoff to be made here: Fire highlights physically don't change hue much compared to the fire body, but we visibly expect "hotter" fire to twist yellow. So a balance has to be struck between merely desaturating highlights, and twisting them yellow. You can see Darktable v6, DxO PhotoLab, RawTherapee, Exposure, and Zoner leaning towards desaturation, while the others render yellow color twists of some form or another. ACDSee and ON1 probably take the yellow a bit too far.

However, there's a flip side to this: Every program that renders yellow highlights in fire, does the same for overexposed skin, twists overexposed skies cyan, and red flowers magenta. It's a difficult tradeoff to get right. This is especially tricky since color shifts in highlights are often baked deeply into the programs' color science, and hard to get rid off where they're unwanted.

Anyway, to my eyes, the only fire-like renderings here come from Capture One, Darktable v5, PhotoLab, and Lightroom.

This lovely scene is a deep crop into an image taken at long distance on a hazy day. The challenge is therefore dehazing the mountains, chiseling out the contours with clarity and texture and contrast, and removing any extraneous noise.

This is a difficult task, as emphasizing local contrast tends to produce halos near the horizon, dehazing tends to introduce unpleasant color shifts, and the deep crop necessitates a subtle balance between denoising and detail retention.

Fujifilm X-T2 with XF70-300 @ 231mm 1/400s f/5.7 ISO200
📂 DSF4442.RAF (23.0 MB)

Overall, most of these renderings turned out fine. But there are pretty substantial differences in denoising, haloing, and detail retention of the shadows specifically. Halos especially are a personal bug-bear of mine, where the sky above the horizon line brightens and (worse) the mountains below the horizon line darken. This is especially visible in ACDSee, ON1, and Zoner, and to a lesser extent in DxO, Lightroom, and RawTherapee.

There were also significant differences in noise removal. Especially ACDSee, Exposure, and Zoner had weirdly ineffective denoising, and were unusually difficult to balance against smearing and worms in Lightroom, ON1, and Silkypix. Colors were a bit difficult to control in ACDSee, ON1, and RawTherapee.

The most pleasant renderings to my eye are DxO, Exposure, and Darktable in this round, although many of the others are very usable as well.

Contrary to the popular style at moment, I sometimes like my highlights a little blown. I especially like a smooth, desaturated, film-like drop-off in my highlights, which seems strangely difficult to replicate in digital photography.

So instead of turning the following picture into an HDR hellscape, I want to compress the bright background into the highlights, while expanding the dark foreground to fill the midtones. The capture actually has all highlight information intact, so I don't want to blow anything out completely, just gracefully fade it into pastels.

Fujifilm X-Pro2 with XF16-80mm @ 16mm 1/400s f/9 ISO400
(no raw, for privacy reasons)

The different renderings of this image are more of a matter of preference than any of the previous ones. To my eyes, I like the versions drawn by ACDSee, Capture One, Zoner Photo, and DxO PhotoLab best, and I recon that many of the other versions could have been improved with a little more manual tuning. The only problematic versions of this image were the strange HDR-like ON1 render, and the Silkypix variant with its lost black point.

Overall, all of these programs seem reasonable tools for image editing. Most of their differences can probably be overcome if you learn them better. That said, this comparison has left me with a few clear favorites. To be clear, the above comparison only showed the most decisive images of a much larger set which informs my opinion. It should also be noted that my tastes in image editing do not focus on detail recovery, detailed masking, nontrivial retouching, or scene-changing edits such as wholesale sky swapping.

One area I am particularly interested in, however, is the inherent complexity of the editing tools: For example, I like my saturation slider to only change saturation and leave lightness alone. Similarly, contrast adjustments should not affect saturation. Another interesting part is the behavior of highlights adjustments. Ideally, I'd like highlights to be able to counteract exposure adjustments so I can balance them against one another. Better yet if the same can be done with the tone curve.

If saturation changes lightness and contrast changes saturation, editing can become rather more difficult, as the effect tends to be hard to counteract without complex luminosity masking. This is a reason for me to dislike my experience with ACDSee, ON1, Exposure, and Zoner particularly. The highlights slider issue also has a big influence on how you edit images. If highlights can be recovered after exposure adjustments, you can use exposure mostly for image brightness, and recover highlights later if needed. On the other hand, if highlights can't be recovered, then the exposure slider must instead be used to protect highlights, and image brightness has to be relegated to the tone curve or shadows/midtones sliders. This feels weirdly backwards to me, and is a reason for me to disregard ON1, RawTherapee, and Silkypix.

The gold standard here is of course Darktable, where saturation ("chroma") is completely decoupled from lightness. And, as a particular point of pride, any module whatsoever can edit highlights without any risk of them blowing irretrievably. In practice, this actually simplifies development noticeably. The former is a bit of a double-edged sword, though, as chroma of bright colors can only be pushed so far without going out of gamut; Darktable therefore provides a second saturation control that additionally lowers brightness to keep bright colors in gamut, much like other tools.

You may also have noticed that the three examples pictures above were taken with Fujifilm cameras. These cameras are highly acclaimed for their film simulations. Of the tested software, Lightroom Classic, Silkypix Developer, Capture One, and ON1 Photo RAW natively support these film simulations. DxO PhotoLab can add them for an additional €139 FilmPack. And ACDSee Photo Studio, RawTherapee, Darktable, and Exposure X7 at least support third-party LUTs which can retrofit film simulations. Funny how programs either charge money for native film simulations, or support generic LUTs. What a coincidence! (Only ON1 Photo RAW supports both film simulations and (ICC) LUTs, and only Zoner Photo Studio supports neither).

So, after spending a few evenings with these programs, what is my verdict?

Physically, the 16‑80 is a slight bit smaller (89 mm vs 98 mm) and ligher (440 g vs 490 g) than the 18‑135, but the difference is negligible on camera. If anything, the 16‑80 actually feels a bit bigger to me due to its larger front element. Some people claim that the 16‑80 feels better built than the 18‑135. To that end, the rings on my 16‑80 turn more smoothly than my 18‑135's, but then that is comparing a new-ish lens to a well-used one. Autofocus speeds are also reputably different, but they feel similar to me.

The 16‑80 has a numbered aperture ring that allows for adjustments while the camera is turned off. On the other hand, the 18‑135 can switch to and from auto-aperture without losing its preset aperture, which is useful as well. The ideal lens for me would have both the auto-aperture switch and the numbered aperture ring. Oh well.

The 16‑80 has a 72 mm filter thread, while the 18‑135 uses 67 mm filters. This is somewhat annoying for me, as my filters are all 67 mm, which also fit on my 70‑300. I'd imagine users of the 72 mm 10‑24 see this differently. Anyway, using a thin polarizer with a 72‑to‑67 step-down ring works without issue on the 16‑80. My inch-thick macro filter however does vignette heavily until 23 mm.

In terms of rendering, I find the 16‑80 to have a gentler transition from in-focus to out-of-focus, and indeed render out-of-focus backgrounds more smoothly than the 18‑135. At the long end, the 16-80 is actually a useful portrait lens, which is an unexpected but welcome feature for my photography.

At the wide end, the 16‑80 exhibits some significant distortion. While the camera or post processing programs can easily correct this, it leaves the image corners stretched, and renders the 16‑80's nice round bokeh balls as ugly ovals. Thus large-aperture shots at the wide end can be somewhat problematic.

Next, let's compare the resolution of the two lenses. To do that, I printed a test chart, and took some test images. All images were taken in identical illumination, on a tripod, with the chart covering half the sensor height/width. The following graphic shows a resolution scale near the center of the frame and near the left edge of the frame. And just for fun, I've thrown in a similar analysis from two prime lenses as well. The resolution scales are in 200x line widths per picture height. On my 6000×4000-pixel sensor, the theoretical maximum resolution would therefore be a resolution number of ⁴⁰⁰⁰∕₂₀₀ = 20. All test images are straight crops from original images, reproduced at their original resolution.

Center images were focused in the center, and side images were focused on the side. A two-second timer was used to eliminate camera shake. Due to the geometry of my room and the size of my printer, all pictures were taken near the close-focusing distance of the lenses. A red line indicates the limit of resolution of these lines, as judged by my eyes. The corresponding resolution numbers are generally consistent with the ones published by opticallimits and lenstip¹, albeit I judged them a bit more conservatively.

The results of this test are surprising to me: the 16‑80 is actually my sharpest lens. It not only bests the 18‑135 at all settings, but also the 35 f/1.4. Only the 60 f/2.4 can reach similar resolution at the same f‑numbers. Generally, the 16‑80 is perfectly sharp right from f/4, while the 18‑135 has to be stopped down to f/8 to reach a similar resolution, especially on the image edges. Only at the long end does the 16‑80 benefit from stopping down.

That said, take these resolution measurements with a grain of salt. For instance, a “great” result of 15 (3000 LW/PH) translates to a blur radius of 1.3 pixels, while a “mediocre” result of 10 (2000 LW/PH) is instead 2 pixels. This is scientifically significant, but not at all relevant to (my) photography.

Additionally, the fact that the 60 f/2.4 macro lens scores so highly but the 35 f/1.4 does not is an indication that these measurements might be biased by being taken near the close focusing distance of the lenses. Thus the next set of images compares these lenses at more natural distances.

At this farther distance, and with a more natural subject, the differences are no longer as easily visible. What differences there are this time favor the 18‑135 instead of the 16‑80. Interestingly, I didn't see any significant differences between these pictures when looking at them “merely” side-by-side in Capture One. Only when I actually assembled these here graphics and looked at them at 200% did the differences become apparant.

Nevertheless, it remains curious that there would be such a difference between the two lenses. Then, someone mentioned that the 16‑80 might suffer from shutter shock, where the camera's mechanical shutter jolts the camera enough to upset the image stabilization system and induce a slight bit of motion blur. An issue such as this might explain the 16‑80's slightly reduced resolution in my test shots. So I created another series of images, but this time both, with the mechanical shutter, and with electronic shutter. In electronic shutter mode, nothing moves in the camera and there can be no shutter shock.

From this comparison, I can see no evidence of shutter shock. It might have been an issue on earlier firmware versions of the 16‑80, but my camera (an X-T2) and lens (at firmware 1.05) does not does not exhibit shutter shock. Furthermore, this series of pictures shows the 16‑80 and 18‑135 essentially matched in image resolution.

All of that said, I must add that all of these comparisons used extremely tight crops of high-contrast geometrical features. Most of the differences here are all but invisible in actual photographs. From these resolution experiments, I see no reason to prefer one lens over the other. Both of them are perfectly sharp in everyday use.

So, how to choose between the Fujifilm XF 16‑80 f/4 R OIS WR and the XF 18‑135 f/3.5‑5.6 R LM OIS WR? My 16‑80 has tighter aperture and zoom rings, does not creep, and has a smoother rendering of out-of-focus background. On the other hand, I do find the increased telephoto of the 18‑135 very useful, and it doesn't suffer from wide-angle distortion as much as the 16‑80.

In terms of resolution, I did not find fault with either lens. Both are very sharp across their entire focal range and the entire frame. That said, the 18‑135 does benefit from stopping down for optimum resolution, while the 16‑80 is sharp right from f/4, and the 16‑80 might be sharper for closer subjects.

My tentative conclusion from these experiments is therefore that I would slightly prefer the 16‑80 for people pictures, where the close-focus sharpness and nicer background rendering are advantageous, and the larger aperture at 80 mm might make a difference. And I would prefer the 18-135 for landscapes, where stopping down is usually easy and the longer focal length comes in handy.

That said, the differences in rendering and resolution are really very minor, and the choice most importantly comes down to the focal range. Which is as it should be with modern lenses. And both lenses are of course very well-built, weather sealed, and have fantastic image stabilization. But you probably knew that already.

Choice. There are so many RAW developers out there. And they all have rabid fan bases, and apparently unique rendering. How to choose?

Here are my house rules:

• Must run on Windows or Linux
• Must run acceptably on my Surface tablet
• Must run acceptably with files on a network share
• Must support my past and present cameras (Fuji X-E3, Ricoh GR, Pentax Q7, Nikon D7000)

In contrast to most other comparisons on the 'net¹, I won't concern myself too much with sharpness and noise reduction and demosaicing. I have yet to see a photograph that was ruined by them, and most RAW developers seem to do a sufficient job at them.

I would prefer a file-based workflow with edits stored alongside the RAW files², and I would prefer a perpetual license instead of a rental contract, but I'm willing to compromize on both if it's worth it³.

Obviously, I am a lot more proficient in my current tool, Darktable, than in any of the others. But for this test, I'm explicitly not doing anything particularly artistic; merely some highlight recovery, shadow recovery, and local white balance adjustments. By limiting myself to these edits, I hope to get an unbiased idea of the various RAW developer's implementations, without needing to ask the endless “what if” of what else I could have done. That said, I will leave all other adjustments on their default settings, to still get an impression of the general look of the programs.

• Darktable 3.0.2 (Free)
  Free, works on Linux, very familiar to me. Allegedly, not particularly fast, with a confusing user interface.
• Adobe Lightroom Classic CC 7.5 ($10/month)
  Probably the most widespread tool. Somehow unappealing to me. Currently only available at a subscription price, but there is a “free” version available through my university.
• Capture One 20.0.4 ($29/month or $350)
  Enormously expensive, even with the educational discount. Allegedly the best default color rendition, particularly for Fuji cameras.
• RawTherapee 5.8 (Free)
  Free, works on Linux. Allegedly extremely high image quality, but no local adjustments whatsoever.
• Luminar 4.2.0 ($90)
  A rather new developer, with fancy AI features such as automatic sky replacements. Not exactly what I'm looking for, but we'll see about its “normal” RAW development chops.
• ON1 Photo RAW 2020.1 ($100)
  Another highly regarded developer with rather traditional tools. This one works straight on files in the file system, though, which is highly attractive to me.
• ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2020 13.0 ($9/month or $150)
  Wasn't this a fancy image viewer a few years ago? Apparently it's now a RAW developer.
• Exposure X5 5.2.1.211 ($120)
  Allegedly super fast, with great sharpening and noise removal.
• Photo Ninja 1.3.7a ($130)
  Another new developer, borne out of a dedicated noise reduction tool, and with an emphasis on “intelligent” tools.
• Silkypix Developer Studio Pro 10.0.3.0 ($200)
  A Japanese RAW developer. I wasn't aware of it until a comment brought it up, thank you for that! And I mention its country of origin, as the English translation is a bit rough sometimes. Quite unusual in its feature set.
• Zoner Photo Studio X 19.2103.2.317 ($50/year)
  A somewhat unknown RAW developer. So much so that I only stumbled upon it one year after the original article. A true Windows-only product that feels at home in Windows like none of the other programs in this list.
• DXO Photolab ($220)
  For the longest time, did not support Fuji X-Trans files. But this has changed in version 5, and I am eager to try it out!

Not considered:

• Aftershot ($80)
  Works on Linux, but doesn't support my Fuji camera because it hasn't been updated in ages.
• Iridient Developer, Raw Power, Aperture
  Mac only
• Affinity Photo ($55)
  Cheap, awesome, but not non-destructive. I'll probably buy this regardless in a sale, just because it's so affordable.

In terms of price, it is hard to argue with free. But considering the price of my other photographic equipment, most prices in this list are pretty adequate. Except for Capture One (and maybe Silkypix). $350 ($200) is a hard price to swallow.

I prepared 18 RAW images for this test, and made a plan of what exactly I would do with every one of them. Then I developed them all in each of the RAW editors. I will only show excerpts here, both to keep private the pictures I don't want to share, and to keep this already long post from exploding.

Also, I mostly show difficult files here that have some obvious challenge. This is because I am usually quite satisfied with my cameras' JPEGs in easy cases, and don't bother with RAW development.

I went into this expecting to find Lightroom and Capture One to be vastly faster in use than Darktable, particularly on my Surface tablet. I also expected better out-of-the-box image beauty, large differences in user interfaces, and for most tools to have very few graphical artifacts. Surprisingly, however, almost every tool showed obvious artifacts of one kind or another, and few tools were actually faster than Darktable. In terms of tools, I found most tools look very similar, yet function vastly differently.

Simple saturation and contrast adjustments, a bit of local contrast, and rarely some dodging and burning or local color adjustments are apparently all I do most of the time, and this generally works well and similarly in all of these tools. However, that is not to say that the individual sliders do remotely the same thing in different tools. So confused was I by this that I measured the response curves of several tools, and they indeed did entirely different things. In one tool, Highlights pushes the upper half of the tone curve. In another, even the darkest shadows are affected a little bit. In yet another, Highlights burns out to the upper quarter of the tone curve if pushed all the way. Sometimes the white point stays white, sometimes it moves. Sometimes it only moves if the slider is pushed past half-way. And that's not even taking into account their different blending behavior and value scales; these sliders may look the same, but there hides complexity beyond measure.

And I did find a surprising amount of graphical artifacts in these programs, particularly the color bleeding in Exposure, and the highlight recovery problems in Luminar and ON1, as well as a number of smaller issues. The one program that truly stands out here is Lightroom, which is more robust to artifacts than any other tool in this list, seemingly due to some significant image-adaptive intelligence under the hood.

I have strong mixed feelings about Capture One. On the one hand, it has one of the most attractive user interfaces of all these tools. On the other, its color renditions are very opinionated, and not my favorite. I love how it reads and applies Fuji color profiles as shot, but then it doesn't apply the Fuji shadow/highlight adjustments and crushes the shadows unnecessarily. And while its color tools sure look nice, their functionality is not that much different than the other developers', and they are spread out needlessly across several tabs. And that price.

Playing around with Luminar was deeply impressive. There are a ton of magic and automatic features in there. But as cool as AI sky replacement is, it simply has no place in my toolbelt, and the general speed of the UI are a big minus.

I like ON1. It's relatively affordable, works with simple JSON sidecar files instead of a library, has reasonable tools, and impressive effects. It can even mimic the look of the embedded JPEG and supports Fuji film simulations. Not quite on the graphical level as Capture One or Lightroom, but very close. And it even runs acceptably fast on my Surface tablet.

Exposure is another program I could like a lot, but the color bleeding and graphical artifacts are just not up to snuff. In one example, it entirely failed to guess colors from an underexposed bar scene (not shown). In another it bled colors out onto adjacent objects for no reason. And white balance sometimes changed lightness as well as colors. I read that this might be a graphics driver issue, but regardless, it shook my confidence in Exposure.

ACDSee was a real surprise to me. I seem to remember it as a fast image viewer, but apparently it is (now?) an impressive RAW editor as well. There is a lot to like about this tool. The magic brush for local adjustments is a particularly noteworthy touch, as well as very robust healing tools. Alas, I found the UI rather slow, and it failed on exporting a few files. I'll try again in a year or so.

I was only made aware of Silkypix through a comment after the post had already been published (thank you!). And what I read on the website made me quite excited! Its tools stray somewhat from the Lightroom-inspired norm, which is a very good thing in some cases, such as the hue-priority highlight recovery. It also works on plain files, and seems to have outstanding Fuji film simulations. Alas, it was very slow to use, and not suitable for my Surface tablet.

I had tried RawTherapee a few times in the past, and was always frustrated by its lack of local adjustments, and the need to view things at 100% to see some adjustments. On the other hand, it can match the embedded JPEG tones, and has quite a number of impressive algorithms. Still, it does not appeal to me. But it's still an amazing achievement and a pretty inspiring community as well.

Photo Ninja is a curious program. Certainly not because of its ease of use, or speed of operation, or image quality. But because it did most things almost correctly automatically. That's not what I am looking for, but it is truly impressive.

I only discovered Zoner Photo about a year after this post was originally published. But I was impressed by what I found: It is a well-designed program with a solid array of tools, even including a pixel editor. And rather affordable, too. Curiously, Zoner Photo does not officially support some of my cameras, but can utilize the free Adobe DNG converter to make them readable on the fly, without creating a separate copy. Smart!

DxO PhotoLabs was another latecomer, which only started supporting Fuji X-Trans files in late 2021. I downloaded it on the day it became available, and was duly impressed. Its tools are less streamlined than in other programs, but seem to be of great algorithmic quality; there was hardly a lightness reversal or halo to be found, the bane of many a cheaper product. I am deeply intrigued.

And Lightroom. As I said, I somehow do not like Lightroom. Maybe because I like to be “different”, or because I associate Adobe too much with bloated software. But I have to say, Lightroom surprised me. While its tools are sometimes in weird locations, it is highly streamlined for a very fast workflow, and it deserves my highest praise for being outstandingly robust against artifacts. But I still don't like it.

Which leaves Darktable. This is a tool I am deeply familiar with, and have used for several years. Yet until this day, I never realized just how strange its tools are compared to the other programs. How weird Filmic RGB must feel if you are used to shadows and highlights sliders, and how alien the graph-based color zones and tone equalizer and contrast equalizer must seem.

Yet, in direct comparison, I find Darktable's tools equally efficient at solving problems, even if the solutions are sometimes a bit different from its Lightroom-inspired peers. One tool in particular I want to emphasize: Color Zones. At first glance, it looks like your standard HSL tool that allows brightness, saturation, and hue changes by color (albeit as a graph instead of sliders). But then you discover the “select-by” switch, and realize that you can modify colors by lightness and saturation, as well as hue. I use this frequently to saturate shadows, which is a great effect I haven't seen in any other program.

No doubt other programs have cool features, too, but Darktable (and RawTherapee) seem uniquely open about their inner workings. And this brings joy to me, on a level the closed, artistic programs can't match. I like graphs, and maths. I'm weird like that.

But what really prompted this whole comparison blog post was my frustration with Darktable's speed. Particularly on my 4K screen, it is not the fastest program out there. And the AMD/OpenCL situation on Linux is still a travesty, which doesn't help. But I learned a thing during this experiment: You must work bottom-up through the rendering chain, if you want Darktable to be fast⁴. Which, in my case, usually means working through Lens Correction → Crop and Rotate → Exposure → Tone Equalizer → Contrast Equalizer → Color Balance → Filmic RGB → Color Zones. As long as I (mostly) edit things in this order, Darktable is fast enough, even on my Surface tablet.

Lastly, I have to say a few words about file management. Most programs here work on some kind of local library that stores all edits. The downside of this is that these libraries are hard to sync between computers, are hard to back up, and need to manually be kept in sync when file locations change. Notable exceptions here are Lightroom, Darktable, Exposure⁵, Silkypix⁵, RawTherapee, ON1, DxO, and Zoner, which keep their edits alongside the RAW files in little text “sidecar” files⁶. Thus even if their library goes out of sync or is lost, at least the edits are still there. To be honest, this is quite an important factor for me.

As for library management, my requirements are small: I want to filter by date, rating, and maybe camera or lens. These needs are met by all programs except possibly Luminar and Photo Ninja. I do most of my file management in external programs on camera import, and with the exported JPEGs, so this area of the RAW developers is not very important to me.

However, this comparison also highlighted just how useful sidecar files are to photo management. I might choose different RAW developers over the years, and my photo management solutions might change over time as well. But as long as all edits are stored in simple text files next to the RAW file, I can rest safe in the knowledge that my edits will never be lost. This is a serious downside to ACDSee, Capture One, Luminar, and Photo Ninja, who keep edits secretly⁷ in their opaque databases.

I also timed my work with every one of these programs. Quite surprisingly, I couldn't find any significant differences between programs. Darktable's workflows, for example, are sometimes entirely different from other tools; but if you know what you're doing the path from identifying a problem to fixing it is still similarly straight-forward and fast. And there is no less experimentation until I arrive at a look I like.

Thus, I am left with Darktable, Lightroom, and ON1. And theoretically Capture One, but that price is just too high for me. If Capture One were $100 instead of $350, I would probably switch to it. Even educational pricing is only available for rentals. I'll have to decline that. And despite all my praise for Lightroom, I still don't like it.

I'll probably buy ON1 at its current, discounted price ($50), and see how I like it in actual daily use⁸. But at the same time. I'll also stick with Darktable on my Linux machine, at least for more complicated edits. I now know that Darktable can dance with the best of them, which is mighty impressive for a piece of free software.

With all that said and done, I have learned a lot about RAW development during this experiment. Regardless of which tool I end up sticking with, this has been a fascinating comparison. We'll see how long I can resist the urge to compare this time.

Addendum: Customer Support

So far, I have been in contact with the Customer Support people of ON1, Capture One, and Zoner. And I must say, ON1 and Zoner were incredibly pleasant and quick and helpful, while Capture One seemed almost reluctant to help. This is actually a big plus for ON1 and Zoner, and kind of big turnoff for Capture One.

Update: Silkypix

I added Silkypix to the comparison, thanks to kind comments underneath this post.

Update: Luminar Local Adjustments

I was made aware that Luminar does indeed have local adjustments, they were merely in such an uncommon place that I hadn't found the initially.

Update: Zoner Photo

One year after the original post, I added Zoner Photo to the comparison.

Update: DxO PhotoLab

One-and-a-half years after the original post, DxO Photo Labs added support for Fuji files, so I added them to the comparison.

The X-E3 is a mirrorless camera, which means it's small. It is a very recent camera with a modern sensor. It's a rangefinder-style camera with the viewfinder in the top left. So it doesn't obscure my whole face when I lift it to my eye.

Compared to a DSLR, this is a small and light camera¹. But paired with the lens, it is neither. That lens, though: a massive focal range from 18 mm to 135 mm is suitable for wide landscapes, as well as tight tele shots of wildlife. Cramming it all in one lens must come with a loss in sharpness and aperture, but the 18-135 is a best of its breed, and still plenty sharp enough for me. And it comes with an image stabilization so sophisticated that I can hand-hold half-second exposures. Which is magic.

This is a great camera for deliberately framing a shot; it feels great to hold, with a neat and efficient control layout for quickly playing with apertures and shutter speeds and focal lengths with a minimum amount of fuss. It is a dependable tool, an amazing piece of engineering, and an artistic means of expression. It is truly a great camera.

If it has an Achille's heel, it's that it takes a while to get ready. Not because it is slow to start up, but because there's a delay before the viewfinder activates when raised to the face. Which just means you will stare into the void for half a second, while seeing the critical moment pass in front of you. Half a second of missing the shot.

And the white balance can struggle a bit with forests and lakes. Forests are green, and to compensate, the X-E3 turns everything else magenta. Easy to fix in post, but annoying. These are minor complaints, and most of the time the X-E3 is as perfect a camera as I've ever seen one.

Here are a few pictures I took with the X-E3 on my last vacation²:

Image quality is simply excellent. Not once has the X-E3 let me down. Autofocus is accurate, and instant. The lens is amazingly sharp all through its focal range. Dynamic range is unreal, at times. As you can see in the pictures, I've shot everything from landscapes to people, to wildlife, long exposures, and even some astro. All with one lens, on one camera.

So, if the X-E3 is my "professional" camera, the Ricoh GR is my fun camera. In 2019, the GR old technology. It was released in 2013, it has a big but aging 16 megapixel APS-C sensor, and a fixed 18 mm f/2.8 lens with no zoom. It shouldn't be able to compete with the Fuji. But there is one thing the GR does better than any other camera: Speed.

The GR is in my pants pocket. It wouldn't be my pants without a GR in it. I have it with me everywhere, all the time. And at the right moment, I will pull it out, and take a picture, before you even notice it's there. That's the GR's mission: The fastest possible time from pants to picture!

Seriously, the GR goes from off to taking the first shot before even its screen turns on³. I can whip out my GR and take a picture long before you have unlocked your phone, never mind started the camera app, selected a focus point, or aimed it at your prey. In the car, I had the GR in the center console, and could take a picture of the roadside before it whizzed past. And without taking my eyes off the road, naturally.

Since the GR has a fixed and wide focal length, I don't have to look at its screen to see what I'm taking a picture of. I can do it by feel. Because all the controls are on the right, I can adjust everything with my right hand only, without taking my hands off the wheel, or stroller, or wife. And then there's snap focus, where a full-press of the shutter will take a shot at a pre-defined distance, without waiting for autofocus. I wish every camera had this feature!

However, all of this took some getting used to at first. I missed focus a lot in the beginning. But once I figured it out, a new world opened up. A world of whimsy and spontaneity that is simply not possible with a bigger or slower camera. A good half of my favorite pictures were only possible thanks to the GR.

Again, there are downsides. It's an old sensor. Dynamic range is limited. Autofocus could be faster. There's a noticeable shutter delay. There is no viewfinder or image stabilization. The white balance is not great. It can struggle with a full memory card⁴.

But none of that matters. I love its colors. I love its sharpness. It has taken quite the beating on this vacation, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The GR is magnificent. There is nothing else quite like it⁵. And so many memories would have been lost if not for the GR:

Many of these shots were taken in the spur of the moment. In situations where I didn't take the big camera with me. Where a big camera would have been inappropriate. But the GR is so tiny, so non-threatening, it can become part my daily life. And capture the fleeting moments that make life worth living. That is a photographic super power if there ever was one.

I often read that micro contrast really tells lenses apart. To illustrate this point, here's an area with very little overall contrast, particularly between the fence and the orange paint, and the fence and the gray stairs:

If you look very closely, you might find the fence slightly less visible on the XC 16‑50 than on the XF 18‑135 and XF 27, and ever so slightly more visible on the 18‑55. But it should also be obvious that these differences are incredibly tiny, and not worth fussing over.

Another common point is corner sharpness, which is typically said to strongly favor primes. This time, the images are cropped from the bottom-right corner of the image that contains some detail, but most importantly a bright white warning sign:

And indeed, the XC 16‑50 is noticeably blurry this time, with the other three lenses similarly sharp. The warning sign also highlights color fringes on the transitions from the bright white sign to the dark background. These chromatic aberrations are almost invisible on the XF 18‑55, and mild on the XF 18‑135 and XF 27.

Bear in mind, however, that these are 100% crops in the very furthest corners of a high-contrast image. In normal pictures, none of these issues will be noticeable unless you really zoom in on fine details at the edges of your frame. The chromatic aberrations seen here were already treated in software with the lens correction module in Darktable, but it might be possible to improve on these results with more dedicated processing.

After publishing the blog post, I still wasn't satisfied: What if the results I got were only true at f/8? What if image quality got worse at a longer focal length? How does my XF 18 stack up?

To answer this, I took another set of pictures and prepared another composite of an crops near the image center, and another one near the lower right corner.

To be perfectly honest, I can not see any significant differences between any of these pictures. At this point, I am starting to question the entire concept of sharpness and micro contrast for evaluating lenses. But at least I learned a lot about how to use the Gimp.

As a sanity check, I repeated the experiment with my old Nikon 18-200, and this was in fact noticeably less sharp. And slightly overexposed. And slightly off-color. That's why I switched to Fuji. But as I said, this was a sanity check, not a fair comparison, as the Nikon D7000 body is much older than my Fuji X-E3, and the lens has surely seen better days as well.

The XC 16‑50 and XF 27 operate their aperture with the control wheel on your right thumb. The XC 18, XF 18‑55, and XF 18‑135 have a dedicated aperture ring on the lens instead. Thus, the former two lenses can be controlled with the right hand alone, while the latter two require the left hand on the lens barrel. Zoom is always controlled on the barrel, though.

This preference for one-handed or two-handed operation is supported by the lenses' weight, as well: My camera, the X-E3, weighs about 330 g. With the 200 g XC 16‑50, the weight is mostly in the camera body, and can easily be held and operated with one hand. The 250 g XF 18‑55 and the 500 g XF 18‑135 are more lens-heavy, which makes a two-handed grip necessary, which is a better fit for the aperture ring on the lens.

Personally, I actually prefer the aperture on the thumb wheel over the unmarked aperture rings on the XF 18‑55 and the XF 18‑135. It just feels more natural in my hands. On the other hand, I like the marked aperture ring on the XF 18, particularly for resetting the aperture without looking through the viewfinder, or when the camera is turned off. In fact, I find the ability to operate the camera while turned off to be very useful in general. It is one of the major reasons why I like Fuji cameras.

In order to assess the image stabilization systems built into these lenses, I took a series pictures of a static subject at 18 mm, 27 mm, and 50 mm, for shutter speeds of 1/30 s, 1/15 s, 1/8 s, 1/4 s, and 1/2 s. I then looked at five images for every combination of lens, focal length, and shutter speed, and labeled them either sharp if there was no visible blur at all, or usable if there was micro-shake only visible at 100 %, or miss if the shot was too blurry.

The XC 16‑50 had perfect sharpness at 1/30 s, was at least ok between 1/15 s and 1/8 s, and even 1/4 s still had a few usable shots. 1/2 s or longer was unusable. There was no significant difference between the focal lengths. That last bit is really interesting, as I would have expected shorter focal lengths to be easier to hand-hold than longer ones.

The XF 18‑55 stayed perfectly sharp one stop longer until 1/15 s, but otherwise performed exactly the same as the XC 16‑50. I would guess that the small difference in stability between these two lenses is mostly due to their weight difference, but that the image stabilization system is identical.

The XF 18‑135, however, was another matter: All shots up until 1/8 s were perfectly sharp, and remained at least usable until 1/2 s! Only at 1 s of shutter speed did I see significant numbers of missed shots! Again, there was no significant difference across focal lengths.

With disabled image stabilization, I could hand-hold most shots for at most 1/focal length, but missed or fudged a few shots even there.

In summary, I found the XC 16‑50 and XF 18‑55 image stabilization good for about two stops, and astonishingly, the XF 18‑135 stable for a full four stops over my personal hand-holding skills. Some of that stability is no doubt due to the increased weight of the XF 18‑135, but nevertheless, I find these results astonishing!

And now, the darling of all photographers: out-of-focus backgrounds. Common wisdom is that the bigger the aperture, the more the background is thrown out of focus. But that's only part of the truth, and honestly, not the most interesting part for these kinds of limited-aperture lenses. Much more powerful is getting closer to your subject: The closer you focus, and the farther away your background, the more the background will be out of focus. This effect gets even stronger when you zoom in.

The XC 16‑50 focuses much more closely than any other lens in this list, at 12 and 30 cm (Fuji says 15 cm). You can get really nice background separation with this lens, and great magnification in your macro shots. The XF 18‑55 focuses at 25 and 35 cm (Fuji: 40 cm), which is not particularly impressive. The XF 18‑135 focuses even farther, at 33 and 43 cm (Fuji: 45 cm), but gains magnification through its long tele zoom. The XF 27 is not optimized for this kind of thing at all, at 29 cm (Fuji: 34 cm).

To me, the XC 16‑50 is the winner for a small/light zoom kit. It might be the least great option optically, but the differences are not dramatic at all, and it is the cheapest, smallest, and lightest lens with the most useful wide end and the closest focusing. But it lacks a dedicated aperture ring and is a plastic construction instead of a metal one, which does detract from the haptic joy somewhat.

The XF 18‑55 is optically the strongest lens. It might even beat the XF 27 prime lens on its own turf! But the optical differences to the cheaper XC 16‑50 and the more versatile XF 18‑135 are quite small, and are not be worth the price/weight/inconvenience to me.

The XF 18‑135 is really surprisingly good. The much longer focal range necessarily comes with compromises in optical quality and bulk, but it seems no significant corners where cut in this case. And the image stabilization is a significant step above the other two lenses. Considering that this lens usually replaces at least two other lenses, I even find the price reasonable. This is my first choice as a do-everything zoom kit.

The XF 27 is not very strong in any particular way, except size. And that size trumps all. If I just want to throw a camera in my bag without any particular photographic intentions, the XF 27 is my first choice. And possibly the XF 18, if I still have room in my bag.

As some small buying advice, the XC 16‑50 was refreshed in 2015 with the OIS II version, which introduced that nice close focusing distance (highly recommended). The XF 18‑135 was apparently built in two batches, the original made in China version that seemed to have horrible QA issues, and a second made in Philippines version in 2017 without.

Aperture. The XF 18‑55 and XF 27 have a wider maximum aperture than the XC 16‑50 or XF 18‑135, by about two thirds of a stop. Shooting at bigger apertures makes brighter pictures with stronger background blur, and some loss in sharpness. I don't find the optical performance wide-open particularly interesting, because most of the time I'd use large apertures to blur the background, making sharpness and distortion mostly irrelevant. And as I said above, getting closer is usually more effective for background blur than maximum aperture, anyway.

Image stabilization. The three zooms offer optical image stabilization systems. From what I can tell, the XF 18‑135 is significantly more effective in this regard than the XC 16‑50 or the XF 18‑55. Hand-held shots with up to about 1/10th of a second seem easily achievable with the XF 18‑135, whereas the unstabilized XF 27 becomes blurry at 1/40th. Videos are noticeably smoother with the XF 18‑135 as well.

Weather sealing. The XF 18‑135 is weather sealed, the other lenses are not. My camera is not, so I don't care.

Distortion and Vignetting. Is fixed in post. No need obsessing over it.

Autofocus speed. Is good. No need obsessing over it.

Many pros limit their ISO numbers, because high-ISO noise is ugly. Which it is. But you know what is even worse for an amateur? Not having that picture of my baby, because it was too dark.

So I set my ISO to unlimited, reduce my shutter speed and aperture so I actually have a chance of capturing my fast-moving toddler. And embrace the ensuing noise. Some of my favorite pictures look unbearably noisy on my 4k screen, but look just fine when printed, or on a smartphone (the two most important mediums in the world). Because of this, I find noise reduction rarely worth the effort. Color heavy noise reduction works ok, but anything else looks worse than the problem. I vastly prefer a sharp, noisy shot to a mushy denoised shot with no detail.

Another common Pro argument: Wider apertures are better. Which they are, at capturing light, and blurring the background. But as an amateur, a wide-aperture super-shallow depth of field just makes me miss shots. At f1.8, the area in focus is barely a few centimetres deep. I missed too many shots because I accidentally focused on the nose instead of the eye. So, in the absence of studio lighting, and arbitrarily many retries, I prefer to step it down and live with the noise, if need be.

As a fun corollary, all those fancy prime lenses with crazy-wide apertures, they are simply wasted on me. Anything beyond, say, f2.8, is not something I need to spend money on. Also, lenses are noticeably sharper when stepped down! I have been disappointed with the sharpness of a number of shots because I forgot to step it down. Nowadays, I typically shoot at f5.6 or f8, and only go wider if I actually need to, because of lack of light, or if I specifically want a blurry background.

I wondered, for a long time, why pros seem to like long-ish lenses for portraits: The answer is, because longer lenses have a shallower the depth of field (for the same f-number), and pro photographers love their blurry backgrounds. But as I said before, that is not for me.

Instead, I prefer wide-ish lenses. If something is too small on a wide-ish lens, it is usually no problem to get a bit closer or to crop afterwards. If something is too big on a long lens though, backing off is often not possible, and you miss your shot¹. Plus, wide-ish angles don't blur as much from shaky hands, and are more compact. They often focus more closely, too, which is a huge bonus if you want to take pictures of a toddler.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, a 50mm and 35mm prime (APS-C). Now I own a 27mm pancake prime, which I find perfect: long enough to get nice portraits, but still wide enough to capture a landscape.

Be careful with super-wide angle lenses, though. Even though they are a ton of fun, I have found anything below 16mm to be very difficult to use effectively. It's just too easy to get that fisheye-distorted look, especially near the sides. That distorted look, by the way, is caused by being too close, not by lens distortion. The same thing happens if you take a longer lens or a cell phone and get too close. Just don't do that.

Pros use the biggest sensor they can get, to get the best image quality possible. But that also makes everything else much more cumbersome: Bigger sensors mean bigger and heavier bodies. And bigger and heavier lenses. And shallower depth of field (see above). And smaller focal ranges, hence more lens changing. And, not least of all, much, much, much higher prices. It is not for me.

To some extent, the same goes for different quality levels: Personally, I have found entry-level APS-C mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras a good compromise. These entry-level plastic lenses and cameras are usually smaller, lighter, and cheaper than their higher-end brethren, but compromise on robustness and aperture sizes (e.g. Fuji X-E2 375g/€250 + Fuji XC 16-50mm, 195g/€150 vs. Fuji X-T1 450g/€250 + Fuji XF 18-55mm, 300g/€250 vs. my old Nikon gear). And for my everyday camera, I' take a smaller, pocketable camera over a "better", bigger one any day.

Haptics are important, too. I have seen great cameras and lenses that just didn't feel good in my hand. Which meant I wouldn't ever take them with me, and wouldn't take any pictures with them. I now go try stuff in the store before I buy anything. This has talked me out of a number of unnecessary purchases, internet consensus notwithstanding.

And finally, I buy used gear. Cameras and lenses depreciate about 70% within the first two years, without losing any quality. A great camera from two years ago is still a great camera, but costs a third of the original price, and can be resold without loss. And is better for the environment. Win-win-win.

I have found many "common" rules about photography useless for my amateur needs. I have found cheap, plastic, used gear more useful than pro gear. I have found noisy, small-aperture pictures to be better at capturing important memories than clean, "professional" ones. I have found haptics, size and weight to be much more important than ultimate image quality (within reason).

The funny thing is, you don't find this kind of information on the internet, since most review websites seem to focus on the professional viewpoint, even for gear that is clearly meant for amateurs like me.