photoblogography - Just some stuff about photography

Studio RAW conversion

in Olympus E-System , Wednesday, January 28, 2004
I've just done a test of RAW conversion using the High Function and High Speed options. I applied zero sharpening in Olympus Studio, and then used PhotoKit to apply capture sharpening. I read RémiG's article on sharpening. I can't reproduce his results: In my case (a winter landscape, similar in type to his test image), there is a slight difference in the results. The HF version seems to have a little extra edge contrast, but it is marginal and only really discernable at 200%. What is slightly more worrying to me is that the two versions have slightly different colour casts. Possibly this has something to do with the (reported) poor color management implementation. But certainly I don't see this "painterly" effect he reports. On this evidence, I don't see much point in HF. However, it will be interesting to look at the results of upsizing. It is possible that HF has slightly more detail. Either way, I'd say that Olympus Viewer and Olympus Studio are two good reasons not to buy an E-1. They're not totally unusable - and maybe are better than Canon's efforts - but they're really not very impressive. If my software team produced this sort of stuff their next career move would be selling burgers...
Posted in Olympus E-System on Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 08:50 PM • PermalinkComments (2)

2 comments

R?miG February 09, 2004 - 9:57
Hi David !

Nice to see my rant linked, even if you don't agree with me 😉 Anyhow, it doesn't matter much since we have the choice.

Btw, did you tested the new JPEG sharpening settings in the 1.1 firmware ?

I've noticed something strange : in raw images taken with the 1.1 firmware, you can set the sharpening setting between -3 and +5 in Viewer, but not in 1.0-taken raws (still -3 to +3 with those), and between -5 to +5 for in-camera JPEGs.

2 comments

david mantripp February 10, 2004 - 8:55
Hi Remi - I haven't tested JPEG - I don't have much use for it at present as I use a RAW->Photoshop workflow.

I agree about the sharpening - I don't see any logic in this. The RAW files just record the camera sharpening settings, they don't have it applied. So in theory you should be able to apply +5 to a 1.0 file .... I also noticed the -3 to +5 range, very weird. I _hope_ that "-3" means no sharpening, but... I guess somebody should raise this with Olympus.

I actually like Studio (and Viewer) so long as I ignore the (lack of) speed and the bugs. It just feels very 0.5, not 1.1.

David