Fun, great upgrades in Lightroom Classic (LRC) and a really nice firmware update for the Leica Q2. It's firmware 5.0 for both the monochrome and regular models...

Lou. In "real" black and white. Shot on film with a Hasselblad "real" medium

format camera. Not one of the "junior" MF formats.

Scanned from a handmade, double weight print.

 Let's get right to it.

I know the top priority for my readers will be the upgrades to the Leica Q2 so I'll start there. Firmware 5.0's biggest new feature is face and eye detection in AF. I tried it. It works and it's snappy. A plus is that you can use the four way touch pad on the camera to select a preferred eye. Otherwise the camera (like most others) selects the closest eye. It's pretty cool. And needed. And, NO, they can't use a firmware update to give you PDAF.

There are a few other touches such as quicker ways to lock focus in AF-C and the usual hundreds and hundreds of fixes to tiny glitches uncaught before now. It's pretty valuable to have a camera maker continue to make improvements years after a product introduction; especially fixes that obviously benefit the users so much. 

The firmware update, version 5.0, is currently available on all the global sites and ready to be downloaded. 

It may be the "placebo" effect but my Q2 camera now feels more comfortable to hold and the files seems sharper, better and more interesting than they did yesterday...

In other news Adobe announced and delivered updates to Lightroom and Lightroom classic. The one that is most interesting to me is the "Denoise A.I." which can be found in the noise reduction menu. In short the new tool analyzes the image and figures out which parts should have the most noise reduced (think skies and other less detailed swaths of image) and which parts should have noise reduction and raw image sharpening and improvements made. So, instead of just reducing noise the feature is looking at the entire image and finding places where noise has obstructed wanted detail and then gone in and fixed it.

This feature, as far as I can tell, only works on raw files, but it also has some user adjustment to increase or tame down the effects of the processing. I tried it on a 24 megapixel raw files from the Lumix S5 and it worked very well with good noise reduction, good sharpening for detailed parts of the scene and no halo effects. The image took about 20 seconds to process and it left the original file intact while creating an adjusted .DNG file in the same folder. 

A corrected image then converted to black and white.

I am quite interested to see the new presets. Especially the "Polished Portrait" preset. Should be interesting.