It's been a hot summer! Here in Oregon we've been breaking heat records - consistently in the upper 90's, some days over 100. With little rain, the lakes are low and the sky is a yellow haze. Vintage Instagram, no filter needed.
Honestly, I haven't pulled the little Fuji X out as much as I should. My excuse? Partly the heat, mostly the endless list of projects that seem to accompany summer.
But there have been a few occasions here and there. My eldest, David, turned 18, graduated High School, and picked up his driving license - all within a handful of weeks! Certainly some proud dad moments there.
To celebrate David and I spent the weekend at a pretty little resort on Indian land off the back side of Mt. Hood. Kah-Nee-Ta is somewhat of an oasis, along a small river in Oregon's High Desert. Lovely, but hot! By the time I was flipping pancakes the direct morning sunlight was already a hot 88 degrees, moving toward a sweltering 105 by early afternoon.
It may be that Lightroom has also suffering from the heat. The big CC 2015 update came a few months back, and Lightroom's been a bit of a pill since. Fortunately, Adobe is improving how Fuji X's proprietary color pattern is processed. Unfortunately, that leaves my nicely honed sharpness and noise reduction presets looking bad - really bad. I need to find some time to experiment and redevelop those presets.
For now I'm finding that backing the sharpening way off and significantly increasing the color noise reduction is helping. I wish Adobe would have incremented the processing engine number when they made the change, every previous Fuji X photo in my library that I had applied a sharpening preset to is now severely over processed.
But, the change is for the better, I just need to make some adjustments and play with a few sliders. Speaking of sliders, there's definitely a few bugs there... looking forward to a small update soon!
Here's to hoping the weather cools off a little, and a note-to-self: Pull the camera off the shelf a bit more often!