You should try the “enhanced details” feature of Lightroom Classic (introduced in Lr Classic 9.0 I believe?). This 100% eliminates the worms and watercolor smearing artifacts in raw files from Fuji cameras. I do this as a first step now on every scan made with my X-T2 and it makes a world of difference. I haven’t done a thorough head-to-head with Iridient X-Transforme, but I have used Iridient in the past and my initial impression is that “enhanced details” in LR outperforms Iridient and gives you greater flexibility later.
If you want to save an already full-processed, positive version, then yes, you should export the result as a TIFF. I would recommend using the included “NLP - Positive Copy - TIFF” option. You can right-click on the image (or group of selected images) to bring it up, like this…
Or you can go into the export dialog, select the “NLP - Positive Copy - TIFF”, and this will give you access to edit any of the options.
This will export a losslessly compressed TIFF file. I generally find that this will result in a SMALLER file than the original camera scan DNG (for instance, just used on an image that was 103MB as a DNG and is now a 72.4MB tiff file), but there are other factors that could cause it to be larger (for instance, if your original camera scan was 12-bits, the resulting 16-bit TIFF file may be larger, even when using lossless compression).
Yes, this is true in the sense that Lightroom is a non-destructive processor. The original CR2 data is not changed. But LR does save all the settings and decisions you’ve made in regards to processing it, and attaches those edits to the catalog.
SO, if you wanted to share the CR2 files directly with another LR user (or archive them with the original CR2 files retained), then you can do this by exporting out your files as a LR catalog.
More details on that process here:
Hope that helps!
-Nate
Creator of Negative Lab Pro