@duncan: i cant hardly believe how you were able to get the shadows back. congrats!! i tried some days ago raw again, but wasnt happy with it, because i couldnt get the highlights back. so sit seems i have to try your way, and take more of the highlights then of the shadow. is tree nr. 2 also printable like that? (its really a very nic pic)
Short answer is yes!
After some pixel peeping on a calibrated monitor I can confidently say that it is good enough for A3. There are no obvious artefacts in the shadows despite my abuse of the LR4 sliders.
I had a think about whether I overcooked my PP, and the tree lacks punch in the blacks.
Looking at the histogram the blacks were not clipping, so I lowered the blacks slider and that has fixed it completely; nice and punchy.
The sky looks fine.
The only other thing I spotted is the left-most fence post has a tiny bit of chromatic aberration (cyan fringe on the left, magenta on the right). Probably won't be noticeable on a print, but is just spottable at 100%.
LR4 doesn't have CA slider adjustment sliders, it just has a toggle on/off - it worked a treat!
The first time I noticed the blacks being so good was processing some recent concert images.
I'd generally been exposing in the same way as my 5DII; so that the highlights blew slightly on the camera screen for recovery in RAW.
It wasn't terribly successful as the recovered highlights never looked totally natural.
But on one shot I'd accidentally underexposed by about three stops (I was in full manual).
The highlights were perfectly exposed needing only a tiny play with LR4 to look great. But the rest of the venue was totally blocked in shadows - rubbish.
But the LR4 sliders recovered the shadows well enough that placing the two differently exposed images next to each other I can't tell which is which except for the dodgy highlights!!!!
I need to do some more experimentation.
I've got two nights of full-on concert photography ahead of me so I should get ample images to try this out in fairly extreme lighting.
This time the X10 is going up against the big guns....
Last concert I had the 60D on the 70-200 f4 IS and the 5DII on the 50mm f1.4; but the 5DII didn't get much use and rarely got pushed over ISO 1000 whereas the 60D got lots of abuse at ISO 3200 which is pushing things harder than I really wanted.
So this weekend I'm swapping them over - 60D gets the f1.4 and the 5DII gets to take the bulk of the shots on the long lens. I'll miss the extra reach but will take the 1.4TC in case I need it badly enough to lose a stop of light.
Where's the X10?
It's taking everything that is not on the long lens or the 50mm f1.4 - experience tells me that will be about half the number of shots taken with the long lens; loads of shots !!!!!