For the love of all that is holy, shoot RAW with the XZ-1

Even if you are not a post processor (like my wife) at least shoot in RAW and use Picasa to do the standard RAW conversion to jpeg. The colors are much more natural and it removes the reddish tone. Here are some quick examples I took last night with flash and RAW + JPEG. Will try some daytime ones this weekend.

There is no post processing at all, not even fill light. These are JPEG straight from the camera and then the RAW files just doing "Save As" in Picasa. The colors from the RAW file actually match what we have!

Yes, I feel that when you set the camera to Natural, red colors change to a kind of orange. I do shoot RAW, and I develop with Olympus Viewer 2, but I ended up with using Muted, and saturation +1.

If you want to shoot jpg, you may try this setting in the camera and see if you like it.
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1. ##Olympus XZ-1, Olympus SP550UZ; Olympus 2003 Ferrari Edition###

I did try muted and the thing I noticed is that it lowers the sharpness as well

I also noticed after looking again that the blacks in the RAW processed kitchen shot have noise and some moire in them. The toys one doesn't seem to have obvious areas like that.

Maybe tonight I'll have a crack at them in Olympus viewer and see.

I have been working on a group of somewhat overexposed photos where the subjects are in front of a wall of windows. I tried using Olympus Viewer, Photoshop Elements on the camera's JPGs and I tried Picasa on the JPGs and raw files. I tried converting ORFs to DNGs and then using Photoshop Elements - also tried Lightroom 3 but both these methods changed the colors too much . I just tried converting ORFs to JPGs with Irfanview and then working on them with Photoshop Elements( I used the auto enhance and then sharpened the pictures). I kept comparing them with that comparison feature that Faststone Viewer has and I like the Irfanview/Photoshop results the best. You may want to give this a try.

I wanted to add that some of the other photos I took that day in a different setting turned out fine with Lightroom 3.
Karin

On the other hand, you are really saying you like the results you get with picassa. Fair enough. But if a person doesn't use picassa, the results with raw may be worse than JPEG.

At least DPR's test said the JPEGs were better than raw:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/OlympusXZ1/page12.asp

It obviously depends on the raw converter.

Perhaps best of all, shoot JPEGs and learn to do a bit of post-processing. I think your sample JPEGs need only the slightest adjustment in Preview or something equally simple to get results equivalent to the raw -- and maybe better.

I think you're overstating the case for raw, though you appear to have found a simple converter that pleases you.

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Darrell

True enough. It could be the bright Arizona sun that colors all our images. I noticed the dpreview said, "bright punchy images" from the jpeg engine. In the examples we looked at they were a bit overdone.

After more looking with Olympus Viewer 2 (which itself is a great Raw processor for the XZ-1) I could probably change some of the camera settings and get the jpegs to come out similar to my raw processed images.

I too noticed that when using 'muted' the sharpness goes down, compared to using 'natural'. In Olympus Viewer 2 I use the following settings: sharpness +1, contrast +1, colors muted, saturation +1, NR off.

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1. ##Olympus XZ-1, Olympus SP550UZ; Olympus 2003 Ferrari Edition###

These settings worked wonderfully for me. Now the colors match what I get from the Raw! (And what they should be!)

I've not experienced the red color cast here in the Florida sunshine. The XZ-1 handles reds much better than my S95.

I'm not convinced that RAW is all that necessary when shooting with the XZ-1. That said, OV2 is pretty slow - on my Win 7 PC. I find Helicon Filter 5 a faster and more intuitive RAW processor. It uses DCRaw on the back end.

Picasa handles JPEGs nicely as does ACDsee Photo Manager 12.
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"Gear is good. Vision is better."

Great
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1. ##Olympus XZ-1, Olympus SP550UZ; Olympus 2003 Ferrari Edition###

I've used IrfanView with .ORF before. But IrfanView does not have adjustment for white balance. In fact, I think it does not pick the same white balance as shot in the photo. If you convert the ORF to JPG using IrfanView, won't you lose all the information?