X100 B&W in-camera conversion test

I'm not sure how useful this will be, but I was interested in the various in-camera effects that the Fuji X100 offers, particularly the black and white settings.

There are numerous RAW conversion effects available; from film simulation colour profiles, to black and white and sepia. Within each of these there are a number of further exposure enhancements. I guess these collectively represent the different films and exposure techniques available in the darkroom, all I know is that they can subtly change how your camera delivers its JPEG images.

I'll not dwell on each as they are well documented and discussed elsewhere, but essentially the standard/default colour profile is called Provia, then there are Velvia for rich vivid colours and Astia for softer results.

Then of course there are the black and white simulations: Monochrome with the options of simulated Yellow, Red and Green 'filters' designed to represent the tones that would have been produce should you have had an actual coloured filter attached to the camera.

Within each of these, there are options to adjust the highlight and shadow tones, which is what I have done. These are Hard, Medium Hard, Standard, Medium Soft and Soft. I find 'hard' and 'soft' a bit misleading as they don't harden or soften the image really and in my mind 'high' and 'low' would have worded it better, but that's just me!

Anyway this gives a huge array of options, so I settled on the simple Monochrome and added all variants of Hard to Soft options. This results in 25 separate pictures. I chose a simple RAF file and converted it in-camera using every variant. I left the sharpness as default and please forgive the image itself - it's not that great I know :-)

The captions tell the settings as H / S (Highlights / Shadows), i.e Hard highlights / Med Hard shadows:

H/S: Hard / Hard

H/S: Hard / Med Hard

H/S: Hard / Standard

H/S: Hard / Med Soft

H/S: Hard / Soft

H/S: Med Hard / Hard

H/S: Med Hard / Med Hard

H/S: Med Hard / Standard

H/S: Med Hard / Med Soft

H/S: Med Hard / Soft

H/S: Standard / Hard

H/S: Standard / Med Hard

H/S: Standard / Standard

H/S: Standard / Med Soft

H/S: Standard / Soft

H/S: Med Soft / Hard

H/S: Med Soft / Med Hard

H/S: Med Soft / Standard

H/S: Med Soft / Med Soft

H/S: Med Soft / Soft

H/S: Soft / Hard

H/S: Soft / Med Hard

H/S: Soft / Standard

H/S: Soft / Med Soft

H/S: Soft / Soft

AS I said to begin with, I'm not sure what actual usefulness this provides. However, it does seem to me that the more dominant of the tones which causes more of an affect (good or bad) is the shadows. Even with soft highlights, the hard shadows look punchy.

I won't be going through each of the other colour and black and white variants - this took ages...!!!