tasteless food, tastefully presented

[Erik Lund]

OK, to me it looks like your trying to lighten the shadows, here the table, and thus introduce a lot of noise and double or uneven lines in the edge of the plate.

[Frank Fremerey]

@Jørgen: I use PhotoNinja 1.2.5 and sometimes it is a breeze to work with that software. On some files it works exceptionally well. But sometimes I do not even get a result that resembles the JPEG out of cam, in quality. I did not yet understand how to work these files reproducibly.

@Erik: Right. This is a spontaneous shoot in a restaurant at ISO 3200 hand held. In a controlled light environment like my studio I can do the thing with my Sinar and expose 1 second from a sturdy tripod at base ISO.

[ColinM]

I love the Cuisine of Vietnam and Thailand, alas many of the Restaurants here adapt so much to "European Taste" that after all there is no taste left.

Thanks for the pictures Frank.
I also agree with the comment above and from Hans C. Some of the most tasty Chinese food I ever ate was out in the Caribbean on the island of Trinidad. Now that tasted goooooood.

[Frank Fremerey]

@Colin: There is a Chinese Restaurant in Hannover, Germany called "Mr. Chiu". He has to menu cards, the second "traditionally Chinese". This is the REAL THING, same as you will eat in China:

Mr. Chiu
Celler Str. 14
30161 Hannover

Not during CeBit or Hannover Messe. Then he will only serve "European Chinese".

[Akira]

The somewhat hard veggie in Gỏi cuốn seems to be lemongrass?  I like Vietnamese food, but to me lemongrass is not something to eat with joy.

Apparently the table is made of wenge which is african species.  No wonder it doesn't fit with the Vietnamese food. 

[Erik Lund]

.....
@Erik: Right. This is a spontaneous shoot in a restaurant at ISO 3200 hand held. In a controlled light environment like my studio I can do the thing with my Sinar and expose 1 second from a sturdy tripod at base ISO.

But the JPG file is fine as is... I don't seem to understand-  It's like you on purpose increased grain? or is it a side effect to sharpening? (Over-sharpening?)

Just trying to understand...

[Frank Fremerey]

Yes, Erik. Pumping tonality through RAW processing for POP effect. Plus a tad of sharpening via Nik output sharpener. Together some grainlike effect you call distrurbing noise. Not even color noise visible.  More artifact noise.

The headroom for such processing in a D600 NEF or even soft JPEG is much bigger than in the X100T. Quite obviously due to physical restraints of 16 MP APSC wich is a pixel density in the D800 range, but also to not perfectly designed Xtrans processors. Bayer sensor processing has come a long way and is now very well proven tech. Xtrans processing is not equally well understood.

Cheers

Frank