would love your tips for pulling every last drop of info in PP w lightroom.
I'll never claim to be an actual LightRoom expert (far from it, in fact). But in regards to getting nice images (to my eyes) from the RX1, I found a number of key things in almost all the shots:
1) I have no idea whether it's the way LR decodes the Sony RAW files, or simply the way the Sony sensor sees things. But the reds blow out FAST. Also, the blues tend to get mighty feisty, too. But nothing like the reds. So, in almost every shot where I had bright red in the frame, I found that I invariably needed to go into the individual color channels, and drop down the red saturation by a good 25-35 points.
2) I found that the images could stand up to some serious sharpening, without falling apart. However, the additional threshold settings need to be fine-tuned for each shot, to make sure that flat areas don't become noisy, or that soft blurs don't get fuzzy.
3) I found that the auto white balance does a very good job in most situations. However, and I'm extremely touchy about this, I feel that it has a tendency to push skin tones ever so slightly too green for my tastes. But final color balance and tone mapping is an extremely personal, and subjective thing. So, some people are fine with a certain color cast. But quite often, I found myself yet again going into the orange and yellow channels to almost imperceptibly push those channels into slightly warmer temps.
4) I found that I needed to keep an
extremely light touch on the "clarity", "vibrancy" and "saturation" settings. For some reason, the RX1 images seem to react very strongly to those settings. With some subjects, that was not only fine, but really helpful. Reflective subjects (like the take-out window) or those with already strong contrast features could handle very heavy doses of those settings. However, delicate images, or especially those of known faces, just didn't like that at all. Either too many unsightly details are exposed, or you get extremely tone "halos" around various shapes.
5) I shot with every in-camera correction turned OFF. So, that meant I needed to lean on LR at times when things like chromatic aberration showed up. Amazingly, that was never all that bad. Nothing as horrific as I would get with my Nikkor 50 1.4 (good grief!!!). But when it did show up, just the tiniest correction was all I needed with the with the magenta or the cyan slider. Literally, just a unit or two. That was it. I could perfectly kill off the color glow of thin branches over bleached out sky. I could knock down the shimmering glow off of fine water ripples. I didn't, however, see any advantage in using the general "chromatic aberration" click box. Like I said, I needed to use the manual fine-tuning.
So, that's it in a rambling nut shell. Obviously, there are tones of other things I do to each and every image I capture. But what I described, above, seemed like very core settings I needed to pay attention to, in order to have a good starting point for the look I like.