Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

The camera program is doing the best it can in a really difficult (I'd call impossible) lighting condition.

Please explain. A well lit kitchen in daylight. Why wouldn't this be ideal lighting conditions? I've been so used to the older SL420 that I'm 100 percent confident this would not have been a problem. OK, 90 percent confident. 80? By "direct light source" do you mean the outdoors through the window or the lamp? It was almost 11:00 AM and the lamp was unlit.

The camera program assumes hand-holding by you. Therefore the 1/20th sec. shutter speed. With a small sensor camera like this ISO 400 is high -- very high and the camera program is reluctant to raise it any higher. Good call there by the camera. That leaves you with f/1.4 plain and simple.

In Smart mode the camera makes the ISO 400 "call", doesn't it? In either case I had Iso set to Auto at the time. To one of the original questions, can I rely on auto modes for satisfactory results? Or will I forever be tweaking them? I find them useful for very quick casual shots like postings to electronics forums, motorcycle forums, etc, etc. In "smart" with everything menu option set to automatic, the camera is making the "call" 100 percent. Should corrections be necessary in the menu set when the camera, in 'smart' has proposed to "easily capture the desired photo by automatically detecting the scene" according to the in-camera description?

Here is a small album of images from the older camera.

https://flic.kr/s/aHsk27EWqW

I was a bit spoiled, even inspired to laziness, by this camera since these images always seemed surprisingly good for just leaving the camera in auto and snapping away. I never had cause to crop, enlarge, or peep beyond what my wsxga screen displayed to me. Close zooms on these do break down a bit quicker than EX2F images posted here. But the colors, perhaps a tad saturated, were spot on next to the subject. Sharpness, contrast, and some sort of indefinable, maybe film-like, good looks to my eye. There are few old barn photos that are similar to the kitchen shots. Bright sunlit sources in the frame, but for the most part the SL420 handled them. One with the brightest window on the outside sun is underexposed, but not even enough to render the shot useless.

These are among hundreds of images on my hard-drive from the SL420. So my first auto jpegs out of the EX2F, and up till present in fact, just don't compare.

I'd set the exposure compensation on the EX2F -.3 on at least a few separate recommendations which seemed borne out by consistent overexposed highlights in the jpegs. I can zero it and reshoot the kitchen shots, but I am pretty confident it will not make a great deal of difference.