then my other question for those that have used studio how is the
workflow with it? options, speed, look?
Here’s what I do:
1. Shoot RAW with camera settings; Saturation=CS2, Contrast=0, Sharpness=0.
2. Sort ORF images using Studio to determine RAW development exposure settings (e.g. as exposed plus 1/3 stop or whatever.)
3. Batch process RAW develop in Olympus Studio with camera setting (except for any exposure corrections determined in step 2 above) in High Function or Advanced High Function mode. If image was shot with wide angle lens process image for Distortion Cor-rection and Shading Compensation concurrent with RAW development. No sharpening at all, because it will lose image detail at this stage. Save image as a TIFF file. If Image ap-pears to have smudging or loss of detail because of over aggressive smoothing by the software, redevelop using Studio High Speed.
4. Apply any noise reduction needed (which is very seldom since I shoot ISO 100 where possible) with Noiseware software which I find to be best for landscapes:
http://www.imagenomic.com/
5. Load image TIFF files into PhotoCleaner
http://www.photocleaner.com/
and use 1-click function to batch process:
A. Adjust levels
B. Adjust saturation
C. Resize for posting to web by cutting to 900x900 pixels max and 250-300K size
D. Sharpen (always except when sending straight to Qimage for printing where I use Qimage sharpening). This is the one and only time my images are ever sharpened.
Normal settings for PhotoCleaner are to have sliders 1 increment from the left stop except for sharpening which is 3 increments from the left and Levels which is on the left stop.
6. Output from PhotoCleaner is sent to Qimage in the form of a TIFF if image is to be printed. Otherwise, select the storage format of you choice if you are keeping the image for file.
7. Special case processing: Occasionally I will have an image I want to keep but the dy-namic range is just too great to display in the original. I usually RAW develop several copies of the image with 1 stop difference between exposures and then process the group of images with Photomatix to compress the dynamic range:
http://www.multimediaphoto.com/english/index.html
Out of focus or camera shake images I usually recover with Focus Magic:
http://www.focusmagic.com/
Any other aberrations to ORFs I handle with PS. However, I now use PS so seldom that it’s no longer resident on my computer and I have to reload it for special projects.
8. That pretty well takes care of my images. Post processing, on the average, probably doesn’t take me more than 30 seconds per image, largely because the vast majority of images are processed using batch processing. I'm no fan of sitting in front of a computer agonizing over how to post process individual images unless one is really special. Sorry if no miraculous secrets were re-vealed but most images coming from an E-1 need very little processing so I just keep it as simple as possible.
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Good Shooting,
English Bob
