E-1 Software

With the first photos comes the first photo-processing. I've installed both the Olympus Viewer and the Olympus Studio Trial software on my desktop machine, which is an Apple Macintosh G4 867Mhz "Quicksilver", with 1.5Gb of RAM and as much disk space as my whole University had back in 1983 😊

As I said before, applying the 1.0.1 updater to Olympus Viewer stops it working. A pity because it claims to solve 1 annoying bug, which is that converted RAW files are saved without colour profiles. I haven't tried it on my Powerbook yet. The announced 1.1 updater does not yet appear to have arrived.

Apart from a mysterious "High Speed / High Function" RAW development engine tradeoff in Studio (the manual has little to say about it, despite being 292 pages long), it seems that unless you want edit tools and camera control, and find RAW batch processing useful, Studio has little to offer over Viewer. In any case, they're both quite clearly version 1.0. Whilst they offer a lot of interesting functionality, they're both clunky and slow, especially in RAW conversion. Roll on the E-1 updated to Photoshop CS.

The RAW developer is especially annoying. Whilst files can be saved using the same file name as the RAW (with the appropriate filetype, so it doesn't overwrite anything), or saved using a rule-based formula, you can't, believe it or not, enter your own filename. Secondly, the type always defaults to Exif-JPEG. Finally (so far), if you ask it to open the converted file in Photoshop, if Photoshop is already open, Viewer crashes - after saving the file, fortunately.

But... the results are pretty good. At 240dpi I get more less full A4 (using no margins on Epson 2100). Images straight "out of the box", capture and output sharpened using Pixel Genius PhotoKit Sharpener and printed using ColorByte ImagePrint are pretty impressive. No tweaking, no optimising. Next step is to go to A3.

I think that Josh Anon's Lightbox software is worth investigating too, certainly for organising all the various derivatives of the RAW files. I daresay that will be the topic of a future post.