About today's poll

Today's poll is about Raw conversion software.

Studio seems to have a reputation to be slow but efficient at reproducing the "OLY colours".

+ Olympus not being the most mainstream brand, new model update can be slower on third party converters.

I wonder if within the oly comunity there is more than 18% (the overal figure for manufacturer own's software) of viewer studio?

Personally I use LR, very happy about it, especially for B&W converion, the reason I transited form Jpeg to Raw in the first place.

What's your experience
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillaumeserandour/

I mix it up these days. I import with Lightroom and I often will then also open Viewer to see how they look. Sometimes they look just right in Viewer, and I'll hit save. Sometimes I have to do various things in Lightroom like dodge and burn. High iso I stick to Lightroom. With landscapes where I'm being extra careful and got the exposure right with no blown highlights, I make a tiff in viewer and then do further adjustments in Lightroom.

The only problem with this method is that my key-wording is inconsistent.

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John Krumm
Juneau, AK

I use ACR 6 in Photoshop CS5. I would prefer to obtain genuine Olympus color with Viewer, but for two problems--one big, one small. Big: Viewer lacks a highlight recovery feature. Small: Even with the Noise Filter turned off, Viewer renders detail less sharply than ACR. It appears to me that Viewer applies some NF even when you turn it Off.

I just installed Viewer 2 a few days ago. It's a huge improvement from Master. However, there are still some points where it can drive you mad. For example: When you doubleclick a RAW file, it is opened in a "dual edit" mode, meaning you can use RAW functions like exposure correction and "normal" edit functions simultaneously. However, one of the most useful RAW functions is missing - Distortion Correction. To use this, you have to open the file in RAW edit mode, correct the distortion, save the file and open it again to use other functions. Maybe there is a technical reason for this, but I find it really annoying. I would like to work with Viewer 2 because it's obvious that if anyone knows how to handle ORF, it's Olympus, but the missing highlight recovery and the bad performance if you apply a lot of editing make it impossible for me at the moment.

...so I'll stick to my weapon of choice: RawTherapee. I just love this tool. It's not pretty. It doesn't have a progress bar, not even for functions like RTC sharpening which can take 3 minutes to render. It crashes. It creates gigabytes of cachefiles. It has some horrible dialogs. And still I love it, because of it's awesome sharpening, color handling, curve editors and highlight/shadow tools. I just hope V3 will be available soon, now that the sources have gone open.

Take another look at your "edit" panel in Viewer. You will see distortion correction down on the list. Works pretty well too.

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John Krumm
Juneau, AK

Thanks John, I really hope you're right.

And yes, it works really well when you use the lens information - that's why I missed it so much in dual edit mode...maybe if I just open my eyes next time I'll find it.

I use multiple software for conversion.

1. Studio to batch convert all using pre-set standard. I do not find Studio slow, after all I use a multitasking OS and not DOS anymore. Studio makes the jpgs in the background and I do other works with the 2 year old PC. Studio invariably finishes its job before I do.

2. LR for conversion to B&W and other non-natural colour effects. Only for some pictures, based on reviewing Studio results.

3. Studio to Panorama Factory to PS CS for colour Panos.

Is virtually indistinguishable with regards to colours from the colours you'd get from Olympus software. There is a very mild change in hues in blue & green, but otherwise the colours are great from Lr
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Raj Sarma
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rssarma
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Follow me on Twitter: rssarma

Olympus enthusiasts from NYC Metro, join UKPSG:
http://snipurl.com/crc3n

less about raw and more about adobe and their marketing power. also, one thing it leaves out is what other things people are doing with their conversion software.

i'm most curious about the "other" category, which is as high a % as almost 3 other categories combined, all really well known programs that have been around for a while.

finally, i'm amazed at the % for aperture---that it's so high. it suggests a certain amount of self selection among the poll takers, which in turn tends to undermine its validity.

I have CS4 and ACR 5.7. I have custom profiles using the ACR profile editor. I find the custom profiles help.

I have Viewer and I have found that the best most accurate workflow is to use Viewer to apply WB, profile, distortion and CA and convert to 16 bit TIFF and this open with ACR to apply any other changes and then into CS4 for any layer or advanced work.

ACR 5.7 gives very good results but Viewer and ACR gives slightly better but it is more work and I only use it for the "special" photos.

i like the colours from Capture One and I'm used to the interface so tend to stick with that software

Have to agree with Raj on this one. I like the results I get from Lightroom 3 - it's very powerful (I almost never use Elements now), fairly intuitive, once you work out what all the controls are for, and certainly a lot slicker than Studio.
Nigel
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http://www.npmimages.com
http://www.npmimages.blogspot.com

PhotoHawk said:

I have Viewer and I have found that the best most accurate workflow is to use Viewer to apply WB, profile, distortion and CA and convert to 16 bit TIFF and this open with ACR to apply any other changes and then into CS4 for any layer or advanced work.

Click to expand...

This may be a dumb question, but I haven't converted to TIFF other than as an experiment, so I don't know: Can highlights be recovered once you convert to a TIFF? I have always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the needed information is present in the Raw file but is lost once it is converted.

That are exactly my findings. I really tried about all RAW converters out there, but at some point i am not satisfied with the colours and have to tweak, but this is newer as consistent or accurate as using Olympus Viewer, exporting to tiff and do the rest of editing in PS.

I did not make custom profiles for ACR so far, maybe that would help a bit, because regarding the workflow and resolution LR3 is great.
Btw: Still using E330, cannot speak for newer cams.

Regards,
Thorsten

PhotoHawk said:

I have CS4 and ACR 5.7. I have custom profiles using the ACR profile editor. I find the custom profiles help.

I have Viewer and I have found that the best most accurate workflow is to use Viewer to apply WB, profile, distortion and CA and convert to 16 bit TIFF and this open with ACR to apply any other changes and then into CS4 for any layer or advanced work.

ACR 5.7 gives very good results but Viewer and ACR gives slightly better but it is more work and I only use it for the "special" photos.

Click to expand...

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Regards,
Thorsten Golder

nmonckton said:

Have to agree with Raj on this one. I like the results I get from Lightroom 3 - it's very powerful (I almost never use Elements now), fairly intuitive, once you work out what all the controls are for, and certainly a lot slicker than Studio.

Click to expand...

Plus you can get most lightly clipped highlights back...with viewable detail... with the Retrieval slider, which Olympus Master/Studio/Viewer has never been capable of.

I think of the Olympus software more as an external JPEG engine, not a RAW processor.

sd40 said:

PhotoHawk said:

I have Viewer and I have found that the best most accurate workflow is to use Viewer to apply WB, profile, distortion and CA and convert to 16 bit TIFF and this open with ACR to apply any other changes and then into CS4 for any layer or advanced work.

Click to expand...

This may be a dumb question, but I haven't converted to TIFF other than as an experiment, so I don't know: Can highlights be recovered once you convert to a TIFF? I have always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the needed information is present in the Raw file but is lost once it is converted.

Click to expand...

A TIFF to me is simply an uncompressed JPEG.... a way too big uncompressed JPEG. Once you leave the RAW file, you leave data behind.

There's nothing better for Linux, and it crashed only on Windows (tried at work, here we don't use Windows).

Plus there's one of us involved, even if theBigOne seems to be leaving, selling all his Oly gear... still, it has some features I miss everywhere else.

cheers,
Wolfgang
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using free and open source software, and an open camera system
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/
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Just to proof my point a little bit have a look at this photo opened in LR3 and OlyViewer without changing any settings (WB as shot, Kontrast/Saturation all 0 in OlyViewer)

And this is using the current standard LR3 profiles which are way better than those of LR2, but still....This is really driving me crazy. Yes, you can tweak the image to look nearly(!) as the one from OlyViewer, but....

What i find interesenting is that this does not seem to bother a lot of people, but why?

Colour is the most obvious thing you recognize in a picture at any size, even web size. That is the main reason why I switched back from Nikon again, i was never really satisfied with the colours, even not view their own tool (CaptureNX). My wife still uses Nikon and sees this totally different, so this must be a very subjective thing i guess, but to me the Oly output looks great most of the time.





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Regards,
Thorsten Golder

Gregm61 said:

A TIFF to me is simply an uncompressed JPEG.... a way too big uncompressed JPEG. Once you leave the RAW file, you leave data behind.

Click to expand...

You give me the opportunity to thank you for encouraging me to explore ACR. As you said, the latest version is practically a stand-alone converter, and is highly efficient. Even Lesa Snider's "Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual" says as much (p.389). I use it regularly for both DMC-L10 and E-510 images. I would rate ACR's highlight recovery as very effective--it has rescued the E-510 for me--and its shadow fill light feature as more effective and controllable than the one in Viewer.

That said, I wish Viewer offered a true proprietary alternative including highlight recovery.

Gregm61 said:

sd40 said:

PhotoHawk said:

I have Viewer and I have found that the best most accurate workflow is to use Viewer to apply WB, profile, distortion and CA and convert to 16 bit TIFF and this open with ACR to apply any other changes and then into CS4 for any layer or advanced work.

Click to expand...

This may be a dumb question, but I haven't converted to TIFF other than as an experiment, so I don't know: Can highlights be recovered once you convert to a TIFF? I have always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the needed information is present in the Raw file but is lost once it is converted.

Click to expand...

A TIFF to me is simply an uncompressed JPEG.... a way too big uncompressed JPEG. Once you leave the RAW file, you leave data behind.

Click to expand...

The demosaicking has been done. That's all that's happened. there's far more information in a 16 bit TIFF than a JPEG.
For instance
PP from a JPEG





Same shot from raw via TIFF





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Bob