I’ve had a chance now
I've had a chance now to evaluate the differences between the Olympus Studio RAW conversion, and the new Photoshop CS Camera Raw 2.1. So far it isn't an easy choice.
in Olympus E-System , Tuesday, February 17, 2004
I've had a chance now to evaluate the differences between the Olympus Studio RAW conversion, and the new Photoshop CS Camera Raw 2.1. So far it isn't an easy choice.
(an inhabitant of Novaggio, Ticino, taken with the 50-200mm lens, handheld)
ACR has the big advantages of histogram display and responsiveness. The live over / under exposure warnings you can get when dragging the exposure / shadow sliders are really good. So for exposure control, no problem. ACR wins. Olympus Studio just has a single slider for increasing or reducing exposure, and, incredibly, no histogram in the RAW converter.
On the other hand, the noise reduction algorithms in Studio seem more sophisticated. ACR insists on applying colour noise reduction by default, as I've said before, but both experiment and general consensus indicate that except at ISO 3200 the E1 doesn't suffer much from this kind of noise.
What is also nice in Studio is the (presumably) intelligent lens distortion correction. There's nothing like this in ACR. It does have vignetting and chromatic aberration correction, but, again, these are not known as E1 faults.
However, ACR does have one big advantage, at least according to Digital Outback Photo's Digital Photography Workflow Handbook (highly recommended by the way), which is that the internal resizing algorithm is very good. Certainly comparing 2:1 with 1:1 ACR output I could see little significant difference.
So, whilst it is nice to think that Studio has some E1 specific tricks up its sleeve, especially since I paid for it, on balance, unless you've got a lot of time to spare, are really worried about lens distortion, and don't care too much about exposure correction, Photoshop CS ACR 2.1 seems the way to go. At least until Olympus decides to put some real development effort into Studio.
(an inhabitant of Novaggio, Ticino, taken with the 50-200mm lens, handheld)
ACR has the big advantages of histogram display and responsiveness. The live over / under exposure warnings you can get when dragging the exposure / shadow sliders are really good. So for exposure control, no problem. ACR wins. Olympus Studio just has a single slider for increasing or reducing exposure, and, incredibly, no histogram in the RAW converter.
On the other hand, the noise reduction algorithms in Studio seem more sophisticated. ACR insists on applying colour noise reduction by default, as I've said before, but both experiment and general consensus indicate that except at ISO 3200 the E1 doesn't suffer much from this kind of noise.
What is also nice in Studio is the (presumably) intelligent lens distortion correction. There's nothing like this in ACR. It does have vignetting and chromatic aberration correction, but, again, these are not known as E1 faults.
However, ACR does have one big advantage, at least according to Digital Outback Photo's Digital Photography Workflow Handbook (highly recommended by the way), which is that the internal resizing algorithm is very good. Certainly comparing 2:1 with 1:1 ACR output I could see little significant difference.
So, whilst it is nice to think that Studio has some E1 specific tricks up its sleeve, especially since I paid for it, on balance, unless you've got a lot of time to spare, are really worried about lens distortion, and don't care too much about exposure correction, Photoshop CS ACR 2.1 seems the way to go. At least until Olympus decides to put some real development effort into Studio.
