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Hi Roger,
I use Fuji cameras as well. LR 5.5 is the current up to date version. It has the Fuji film emulations in it.
I use PhotoNinja as it has the best RAW converter for Fuji. Irident is considered the best if you are using a Mac. Lightroom is one of the weakest although having said that its not that bad and they upped their algorithims about 6 months ago. Now they have added the Film emulations. LR is certainly quite good its just PhotoNinja is better.
Canon's program is free which is pretty unusual. Nikons you have to pay for (its quite a good program though) and Fuji is a smaller company in this field (big in lenses though - Hassalblad Medium format and TV lenses). So its 3rd part software unfortunately for the best.
I am not an expert on the various ways of setting up LR but its pretty good program overall once you get to use it a lot. I think you have to setup your custom settings for how each image is developed as it is imported into the program. Adobe have lots of tutorials on LR so I suggest watching a few of those to see how its done but you can see the menu items when in Library mode on the right side of the program.
Silky Pix converts RAWs quite well also but its not a popular interface.
I like PhotoNinja and the way it handles. Its quite simple and easy to understand. LR is a bit more comprehensive in its processing suite and its various tools. The noise reduction for example is the best of any program including Photoshop.
So persist with it and you'll get what you want. I have found importing RAWs they do look like what in camera shot so there are probably settings you need to click on so it is setup the way you want it to. LR is a bit of a world like Photoshop is. Fortunately its largely intuitive. It took me quite a while just to get LR to import images and display them as thumbnails!
The XE2 will be a nice complement to your Canon gear. You will find it is quite low noise at ISO3200-6400 and because it does not have an AA filter it is generally very sharp.
Fuji in camera jpegs are considered by many to be the best out there.
The lenses are right up there and getting even better. Much better than the similar offerings by other makers for the same price. They are all metal for one thing, almost all have aperture rings and a manual focus ring. AF is not as good as DSLRs still but certainly workable (not that you are likely to be using AF in nightscapes).
Greg.
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