Importing Olympus RAW into Lightroom Classic

Hi folks, seasons greetings to all

Lovely to have a bit of time off so as to attend to all those niggling issues I haven't got to in the year. One of those was concerns as to how RAW files were looking in LR from my PEN-F (& E-P5). Have just felt recently that the RAWs weren't looking so good (rather dark and very grainy). Felt I must have changed something in LR so time for a bit of research.

I came across this very useful YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ZsnVB1iao

Checked my settings in LR and have now set up that for the Pen-F, RAW's use the Adobe Neutral RAW Profile. This seems to give pretty much the same image as I would see in Olympus Workplace for both the RAW & JPG. Previously images were coming in using a Camera Natural Profile which just looks a bit dark and grungy to me.

Other key change (as set out in the video above) is to change Luminance Noise Reduction setting in the LR Develop Detail section - by default it seems to be set to Zero - have changed to 20. Have also changed Sharpening from 40 to 50.

These changes, to my eye, have nicely improved the look of the RAW's as displayed in LR. Other folk may well already know about this and have their own chosen magic formula for RAW import. I am enjoying both the Adobe RAW Neutral profile and the Adobe RAW Standard profile.

Hope this is of use.

Kind regards

Edward

PS - don't know why I can't tag this post with Lightroom - doesn't appear in the available Tags?

If I know I have high ISO files, I just process them all through DXO PureRaw Deep Prime de-noising. I find DXO does a much better job at removing noise but retaining detail than Lightroom Classic can.

I also often go for that analog look in my images, so I don't like sharpening the images. Sharpening makes sense in some situations but certainly not often in my case (though this is a subjective choice). Also even if I end up sharpening I usually just do it on some parts of the image, as sharpening increases noise. So to achieve that creamy look of out of focus areas, global sharpening is not always desired.