Thanks

ETTR (as we understand it) simply means to expose the RAW file in a way that minimizes artifacts that are associated with the decompression of tonal values.

Luckily, things have improved since 2009 (when Sandy wrote his article) and pretty much all state-of-the-art RAW converters now offer some kind of “lighting” function to do just that. Silkypix 5 has an HDR and a Dodging slider, Capture One 7 has two “HDR” sliders, Lightroom 4 is doing it with their Highlights and Shadows sliders, DxO Optics Pro 8 offers “Smart Lighting” etc., heck, even the Russian RPP 64 converter (which is based on DCRAW, here’s the developer’s blog: http://raw-rpp.livejournal.com/) offers a box where you can enter “compressed exposure”, which is just another term for applying a tonal curve correction that keeps the highlights and boosts shadows and midtones to different extents.

Nikon’s D-Lighting and Sony’s DRO are actually a black box hardware/software module called Iridix from Apical, a London based outfit that likes to remain in the shadows and keep their trade secrets in order to make what they do appear like magic. There was a time, though, when Apical did actually publish a few white papers on dynamic range compression, adaptive ISO and the likes, which I happen to have read. Those are all gone, but there’s a small feature on dpreview (also from 2009): http://www.dpreview.com/news/2009/3/18/apical

Fuji isn’t using Apical, of course, they use their own tonal compression scheme (so does Canon, btw), which is wise given Fuji’s tendency to feature unconventional sensor layouts. As you can imagine, Iridix would not work out of the box with an EXR sensor, so Fuji needs to control their own tonal value compression/decompression scheme in order to make it work the same way over their entire product line of cameras, which includes EXR, Bayer and X-Trans sensors.

In any case, when shooting RAW only, ETTR means to disable any DR/DRO/D-Lighting function (aka set DR100% on your Fuji camera) and expose in a way that sets the important highlights to the right of the histogram. With experience, you can expose more precisely than Fuji’s built-in DR function, which only works in rather coarse 1 EV increments (DR200%, DR400%).

Ironically, if you keep choosing “extended ISO” as the topic of our next article, you will actually hear about how the camera is using “classic ETTR” to achieve ISO 100, just like Sandy has described it in the article you have linked in your comment.

A) Third party lens selection
B) thrid party flash selection for xpro1

Thanks again andthe best of lucks for 2013