Buzz about the Leica Q2 Monochrome piques my interest in black-and-white shooting using the standard model, which I purchased on Dec. 27, 2019. B&W is what I see in the EVF (electronic viewfinder) when composing, but the sensor saves color as RAW and black and white as JPEG. Seriously? DNG me something I can meaningfully edit.
Last night, Cali hopped up on Neko‘s chair, which he hasn’t used much lately. So I grabbed the Q2 for a quick, spontaneous portrait, which is close-cropped but otherwise not manually altered. Vitals for the Featured Image, aperture manually set: f/2.8, ISO 4000, 1/125 sec, 28mm; 6:19 p.m. PST.
Vitals are the same for the color companion, captured about six seconds earlier. I share the photo to express my positive impressions with DXO PhotoLab 3 Elite feature SuperRAW Noise Reduction. When comparing to the Adobe Lightroom Classic, the same original is considerably cleaner and sharper opened in PL 3.
I purchased the DXO software months ago but hadn’t really used it until yesterday. Version 4 is available, and I grabbed a discounted upgrade available as a holiday promotion. Some tweaking could have lightened Cali’s face, but I am not really yet familiar with the PhotoLab editing tools to comfortably muck around.
As an aside, I had planned to write this post last evening, but my ISP behaved strangely, with DNS not resolving to most destinations. This morning, I awoke to see disturbing Google-issued server certificate warnings for certs that should have been valid. Whatever the problem, it better not be some security breach on the Internet service side that makes my lowly humble home network vulnerable or even compromised.