A week of travel with manual focus primes on the GX8

Thanks for the review.  I want one of those 17.5s!

"here's the crazy thing: Whatever color profile comes in LR6 has always stripped away a significant amount of PUNCH in the Pany files. What do I mean by this? Well, when I first click on a photo in LR6, it looks great, but then a few seconds later, LR6 re-draws it with "the flat colors palette". Since I shoot RAW+JPEG, I'm guessing that the first image shown is the JPEG, and the re-draw is the RAW with the LR6 color profile applied, but that is just a guess. Regardless, that first image ALWAYS looks far better than the second one."

That is the way LR is supposed to work.

Even with RAW only, after import the "embedded" (in the RAW file) first preview is displayed. It includes all the sharpening, saturation, luminance, etc that the camera does to process the RAW data to what you see on the LCD when you chimp. Then, LR builds a second preview from the RAW data that is intended to be free of all corrections so that you can make them to your taste. You get to add the saturation, sharpening, clarity and vibrance to your taste, rather than Panasonic's.

There are two LR provided methods to quickly adjust the intentionally dull preview. One is the tiny "Auto" button in the Develop module. It will bump the sliders to something Lightroom guesses will make you happy.

The other method is to apply a "preset". After one trip where I compared my RAW results to my DW's JPEGs from her Panasonic purse camera, I was frustrated. Her colors were "better". Asking for advice, she said, "Set it to 'Happy Color'". The Panasonic LF-1 really does have that choice in the menu. As best as I could, I created a custom preset to mimic Happy Color and can apply it to some or all of my images! Point and shoot JPEG purse cameras be damned! I shoot RAW!