Thank you Guy for pointing out the cause of the problem.
This problem that you see has never been a problem for me in many years of peering at screens, I guess that I must be accepting that the screens I own do not show the "whole picture" in as much as I would need currently a monitor of 4608x3456 pixels that would need to be around about 24 inches screen width minimum and viewed rather closely to see all that the pixels that inhabit those files.
When working on edits of images then usually the whole image is displayed way way smaller anyway due to the real estate required for the edit program with all its sliders and junk. That's why sensible programs use a simple double click on the image to toggle between available window fill and 100% pixel display, or like FastStone when you get full screen display you can press "1" or "2" etc to get 100% or 200% views of some of the image. That is all to do with checking sharpening and noise control adjustments where pixel peeping is of use.
Let me ask you this, do I need to learn RAW photography
Yes.
No.
Still the same display issues if that is your main problem.
I know very little about RAW photography and have no experience with it.
It's about as easy as fiddling with jpegs but better control and adjustment is available as you are dealing with the data from the sensor and not the camera's jpeg version of data which is 8 bit per colour and compressed to varying degrees. More at the end....
I never had a camera that was able to take RAW pictures before this one so I would need to read up on it if you think it would be worth my while. Do you have any suggestions or ideas about this or am I straying from a workable solution.
There is no realistic "solution" to your perceived problem, we all have always worked this way. Most times looking at the whole scrunched image to judge overall brightness, contrast, saturation etc, then a portion at 100% to see the effects of sharpening and noise reduction if needed. A good quality IPS monitor properly calibrated lets us make sensible decisions about adjustments to the image.
Just as a side note I read your web pages on the E-PL1 and E-PL5 and now I have a much better understanding of some of the camera functions and I thank you for that.
All my stuff is just my memory store of things that I mostly found here on the forum. Having found it then it makes sense to make it available to all. It definitely needs a huge rework to make it more user friendly and that has started (slowly) only on my hard drive so far.
Someone at Olympus needs to supplement their documentation department with some real down to earth people like yourself.
No, then people would say that I am just a mouthpiece for the company, and I for one would never let that happen. Witness Robin Wong and his Olympus pages, he now works for Olympus and is definitely not afraid of criticising where due, but still is sometimes called a "fraud" just because Olympus now employs him. The usual idiots here find faults with people if they can't find enough faults with the camera gear.
The manual was clearly produced by engineers and technicians who fully understand all the camera function and don't feel the need to explain how they work, just how to turn them on and adjust them. It is very overwhelming for someone trying to graduate from point and shoots to pro or semi pro cameras.
Yup, I see your pain. The "lesser" cameras often have spectacularly good manuals explaining WHY you need a feature. Olympus can't even manage to tell us all the details of what happens in the cameras let alone WHY you may need to use a feature.
There is absolutely no reason why they can't make a good complete and explanatory PDF manual to be available for download, mainly because the days of supplying printed manuals are long gone and all we do is download anyway.
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Picking up on raw file talk......
Now that I am getting better at using raw converters, currently DxO, always buying only during discount periods for original version and then the upgrades. So the software costs need to be considered but can be significantly cheaper when looking for Black Friday sales and the like.
There are of course free converters like Olympus Viewer 3, slow and a bit cumbersome and mostly only providing exactly what the camera itself does as they both share the Apical image processing logic. The main criticism with the camera jpegs and the Oly Viewer 3 output is that some degree of noise reduction and sharpening is applied even though we attempt to reduce that to nothing at times for various reasons. Other raw converters are more controllable.
The initial issue with raw files is the size of storage. No problem now that SD cards and disk drives are so darn cheap, so I always shoot raw+jpeg and keep the lot even though I may at times just use the jpeg for casual shots and sharing in the family.
As I get better (questionable always) with raw conversion then it become much clearer to me that I should have always taken raw+jpeg so now I could go back some years to those raws and do a better job with favourite images. The trick being that raw converters get better and better as the years pass by and manage to make old cameras look better than ever if the raw files were to be available.
Just like I did a city visit some months back and took only my old Panasonic LX3 in a belt pouch. Raw+jpeg of course, but when I applied the raw files to DxO suddenly I was looking at an old camera with renewed respect.
Anyway, often it is not so much about using raw files to do better jpegs than the camera, often it's about using the raw files to do a totally different jpeg compared to what the camera can do.
So, even if you do not want to fiddle with raw files then it is definitely worth facing the storage problem and taking either all raw+jpeg or only doing that for shots judged to be difficult, and maybe some time in the future coming back to wrestle with the raw files.
Of course managing all your files can be a pain, but slowly I found that using FastStone Viewer to upload from cards into auto day dated folders and later add some useful text to that dated folder name, and keep a separate day dated folder structure for the raw files. For me stuff seems easier to find that way.
My folders end up looking something like this......
That trip sadly I took only jpegs, now I wish I had taken raw+jpeg.
Whatever you do the most important thing is to always have backups, all my computers at home have a pocket sized USB drive plugged in where auto backups of all my stuff that is useful happens every 30 minutes or so (SyncBack SE does that and there is a free version). Plus more copies of the backups as well, so maybe the whole image file system exists in up to 5 places at home on various drives and also a big Network Storage device. It has saved me a few times when computers die or some badly done delete goes all wrong.
Regards..... Guy
