No flash? No problem! Lightroom and the Fujifilm GFX.

At the Photo Days photographic trade show in Brussels this weekend, I had the honour of doing some GFX studio demos with two lovely and very talented models: Rosalinde Kikstra and Sooraj Subramaniam. I had a number of Godox flashes and modifiers set up and I'll post some images later of those results but the image that probably underlines the GFX's fantastic capabilities the most was one I made by accident: on one of the shots in a Black and White portrait series, I had misaligned the trigger so the flashes did not fire. All I got was a heavily underexposed ambient exposure shot.

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400

So, in front of a live audience, I said, jokingly... let's try and see what we can make out of this... I increased the Exposure slider by almost 5 stops (the maximum in Lightroom), dragged a couple of other sliders around and half a minute later got this result... 

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400

Here's the two of them side by side in the Lightroom interface.

And below is a 1:1 crop. I added 25 Luminance Noise Reduction in Lightroom and of course there is still some noise but considering the fact that my ISO wasn't even at the base of 100 but at 400, I think the result is nothing short of fantastic...

For me, the takeaway from this accidental experiment is that if Lightroom and the GFX can do this on a completely underexposed file, imagine what you can do with a halfway decent exposure. Just about anything, I guess...

Oh... and just for the sake of being complete... here's the actual image with the flashes firing :-)

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400

FUJIFILM GFX 50S | GF120mmF4 R LM OIS WR Macro @ 120 mm | 1/125 sec @ f/5.6 | ISO 400