About today's poll

Better be, with the size of the thing ;-)

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillaumeserandour/

Thorsten Golder said:

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

Click to expand...

I agree about the color differences. I downloaded the trial version of LR (I believe 2.5) and it did strange things to certain photos. Random RAW photos would get a red tint with a noticable loss of detail.

I would open them in Master and put them put side by side, zoom in a little, and the Master version was way better. Converting to jpeg from the RAW with both and they would have the same difference. If I converted the RAW to TIFF in Master then opened it in LR the tint was gone and the detail was back and I could edit the photo and save to jpeg with no tint or loss of detail.

I tried everything I could to get around the problem, but it appeared to be random and not correctable. So I decided against LR given the expense.

I use Gimp and plugins if I plan on heavy editing. Rawtherapee does a decent job but is slow pulling up thumbnails and doesn't batch convert. The Olympus software crashes on my PC (and won't work until I reboot) at random times if I have too many files in a single directory.

I may have a look at a trial of LR3 to see if I run into the same problem with the same photos.

wjlonien said:

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.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the RawTherapee plug - it is (obviously) the software I use most, too, although if Lightroom were cheaper I would consider using that (played with the beta and really liked what I saw!). RawTherapee is definitely nice for some more advanced stuff (Emil's demosaic and noise reduction work in the past couple months has been AMaZing, pun definitely intended!) While it may not be quite ready for prime time at the moment, work is progressing quickly, and we are re-organizing resources to hopefully get a more stable version out soon.

As for my decision to go to Nikon... believe me, it was not a simple one! I love the output of my Oly cameras (and especially the E-30 was a well thought-out and implemented machine). I fully anticipate that my photos will take a quality hit, at least initially. I think that in the long term, though, this makes more sense for me ; with Olympus stating that the mid-range 4/3 bodies would no longer be developed, I had essentially no upgrade path (the E-X range is too expensive for me, and while µ4/3 is a nice concept, ergonomically I am not a fan of the Pen lineup). Since I bought most of my gear used, I didn't take much of a financial hit to switch systems, and once I get the hang of the different system, I (hopefully) will look back in a few months' time and be confident that I did the right thing.

Regardless, I will always have a fond place in my heart for Olympus SLRs, regardless of what happens to the 4/3 line over the next few years.

Cheers
--
--Wyatt
http://photos.digitalcave.ca
All images (c) unless otherwise specified, please ask me before editing.

The Big One said:

Thanks for the RawTherapee plug...

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You're welcome mate - and it's good to hear that that project is alive. In fact I read your forum and the newest web site posting as well, and I'm really looking forward to what is coming...

The Big One said:

As for my decision to go to Nikon...

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Well, cameras are tools. Like raw converters. Motorcyclists also say: "It's the rider, not the bike..."

The Big One said:

Regardless, I will always have a fond place in my heart for Olympus SLRs, regardless of what happens to the 4/3 line over the next few years.

Click to expand...

Well yeah. For m43rds, I'm really wishing for a nice RF like the Fuji X100, but still with changeable lenses. For regular 43rds, the E-5 sounds amazing, but let's see what they'll have to offer as an E-620 replacement.

Until then, I'm using what I have. To be back on topic, all my photo file names end with _rt, means they were processed from raw using RawTherapee. Here's one which my wife Mitchie took of me just before she went to bed.

E-520 at ISO100 and 1/160th, OM Zuiko 1.8/50mm at f=5.6, off-camera flash bounced over ceiling at 1/4 power:





And because it wasn't my shot, I changed the Exif info to her name, of course also with using RawTherapee. Thanks again for that gem of open source software, Wyatt & RT staff!

cheers,
Wolfgang
--
using free and open source software, and an open camera system
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/

wjlonien said:

Thanks again for that gem of open source software, Wyatt & RT staff!

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You are very welcome, although I have honestly done very little myself -- I compile the Mac version, and try to help with some administration work. The programming is done by people much smarter than me (Gabor being the originator and main developer, with contributions by many others).

Cheers
--
--Wyatt
http://photos.digitalcave.ca
All images (c) unless otherwise specified, please ask me before editing.

I'll have a look at it on my linux machine.
--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillaumeserandour/

Nothing like a little flash to make it look like the 520 doesn't even have an AA filter.
Very sharp.

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John Krumm
Juneau, AK

jkrumm said:

Nothing like a little flash to make it look like the 520 doesn't even have an AA filter.
Very sharp.

Click to expand...

Thanks John,

but I think the sharpness here is due to very careful manual focusing (at f=1.8) with the really nice OM Zuiko, which was then stepped down to f=5.6, where according to Lenstip it's on par with the ZD macro.

And the rest is due to RawTherapee again, with its wonderful RL Deconvolution sharpening. Couldn't have done this with a simple unsharp mask.

So credits to Mitchie, the lens, and the software.

cheers,
Wolfgang
--
using free and open source software, and an open camera system
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/

Good idea. I still take and use the stable 2.4.1 version. You really can do so much more than with a combination of DCraw of UFraw and The Gimp...

The workflow is in the manual.

cheers,
Wolfgang
--
using free and open source software, and an open camera system
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/

I use Viewer

Yep - I forgot about highlight recovery. I'm constantly amazed by how much extra detail you can recover if you need to. L'd like to say I always nailed the exposure in camera, but.....;0(

N
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http://www.npmimages.com
http://www.npmimages.blogspot.com

I find their RAW conversion is really really close to the Olympus results (and this is born out by some tests).
--
Mithandir,
Eternal Amateur
http://www.shooting43.com/

Unless stated differently, any image I post is licensed under CC-by-nc

For years have been a die hard Debian fan, so the update cycle wasn't that compatible with photo editing, but I have recently gone ubuntu (still have a Lenny at work though) and I might have a better look at how things are progressing on that side.
--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/guillaumeserandour/

I see. Well it's Lenny here for me, but I have a second partition with Ubuntu on my hard drive, just in case. My wife, my brother, sister, son etc. all use Ubuntu by now. Oh no, wait, my son changed to Arch Linux lately. And he loves it.

The only one who also still runs Debian on her Eee PC is Zuleikha (5.5 years old)

cheers,
Wolfgang
--
using free and open source software, and an open camera system
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://picasaweb.google.de/wjlonien/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/

Gregm61 said:

Gregm61 wrote:

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.

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TIFF is a file wrapper where as JPEG (or rather JFIF, as JPEG is a compression algorithm) is a file format. So a TIFF file can have several different types of uncompressed or compressed data types including JPEG!

Joofa

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Dj Joofa