This is just a quick post, prompted by the release of Iridient RawDeveloper 1.5, and various writings over at the lair of the auspicious dragon... This is NOT a test. I try things out, but I don't test them. I rarely read the instructions properly, I am not methodic, and I get bored quickly, so for < INSERT DEITY OF CHOICE HERE >'s sake, take it with an enormous pinch of salt. Anyway, since I was one of the first to spot the famous Tetris effect which showed up E-1 RAW files developed in some software, back in early 2004, I continue to take some interest in the topic. Since Iridient RAW Developer (IRD from now on) is quite well rated by many, including me, I decided to see how well the new version, 1.5, deals with the issue. The task I gave it, and others, was to render a lone poppy captured in a field in the Marches region of Italy some time ago, and which featured in a previous post: Not too challenging, although it is a touch over exposed, and is only vaguely acquainted with the concept of "in focus". Here, without further fanfare, is how IRD, CaptureOne Pro v3.7.4, Adobe Camera Raw v3.3 and Olympus Studio v1.5 coped. Please ignore the colours. I did back off the exposure a bit, but I certainly didn't bother with anything else. Sharpening is application default in all cases. First up, RAW Developer 1.5 Ouch. Let's see how the Danish entry performs: CaptureOne Pro 3.7.4, come on down. Hmm. Danemark, nulle points. (for readers who don't get that, substitute "Ouch"). Back of the classroom for C1. Ok, how does Thomas Knoll's meisterwerk manage ? Over to you, Adobe Camera RAW 3.3 A bit better, I think, but what gives with these blotches ? Just for fun, let's see how iPhoto, and hence CoreImage, and hence, sort of, maybe, Apple Aperture would manage; Hmm. A bit pink, Steve, but once you get over that, look, no Tetris! (Later edit: and look at those strange edge effects. iPhoto sharpening I suppose) Finally, over to the Great Ninja itself, Olympus Studio 1.5 As expected, no Tetris here (the colour is pretty much spot on too...) So... what ? Well obviously if I was exclusively printing photos of poppies at 200% (did I mention they're all at 200% ? No ? Ok, they're all at 200%), I'd obviously not be straying too far from ACR (or Studio if I had infinite time on my hands). I'm pretty much a CaptureOne fanboy, and whilst clearly one needs to keep an eye on things when their is a lot of red about, it still floats my boat. What I don't like about C1 is the enforced organisation of files into sessions, and IRD actually is extremely (even rashly) flexible in that area. It is actually far easier to use IRD with iView MediaPro as the catalog / browser than it is to use C1 in that way, despite industry alliances. I'll probably stick with CaptureOne for now, mainly because I'm stubborn, but also because I find there's a little too much knob twiddling potential in IRD, and some of it is a touch opaque. For example, it is very nice having two extremely clever sound new sharpening methods, but just a few paragraphs of explanation to go with them, especially on the sliders, would be a comfort. And in Studio, there isn't enough knob twiddling (no black point adjustment, for example), and the inscrutability of some of the controls certainly reinforces cultural stereotypes. As for the usability, and did I mention the lack of EXIF in 16 bit TIFFs ? Oh yeah, I did... Well, both stink. So, as far as the Tetris effect goes, it looks like Olympus Studio remains the boss.

This is a diatribe about getting locked into RAW converters. Take it with an even larger pinch of salt than usually recommend for my rants. Yes, I know: RAW liberates us. We can fix anything in the mix. We can change the exposure, change the colour balance, obtain radically different versions of the same source. How very unlike film, where most of these parameters are set in stone the moment we press the shutter. With RAW, we can keep our options open. This is not a bad thing. Far from it, but there is another side to the coin of infinite choice - infinite options. What, exactly, is the image we have captured ? When we print a processed file, this is just one of these variants. Again, this is nothing new. The same could be said of printing from a negative. But in the case of a negative, we have one negative and many prints, a fairly easy combination to manage. With RAW, we have any number of variants from the RAW converter, various post-processed versions of each of these in Photoshop, and the prints. How do we trace a print back to the source ? And this assumes just one RAW converter, whereas for most if not all formats, there are many choices. For Olympus E-1 ORFs, there are two converters from Olympus, two from Adobe, CaptureOne, Bibble, RAW Developer, Pixmantec, Silkypix, and more obscure options such as Silverfast. There are probably at least 15 options. Most people have their favourite, but there seems to be general agreement that there are merits to using several. There is a basic difference between a RAW file and a "traditional" file such as TIFF or PSD: RAW files are never touched. RAW converters record a list of settings which, when applied to the RAW, are used to create an output file. Different applications use different strategies to store these settings. Some, like Adobe Camera RAW, or Olympus Studio, save a separate file for each image. Others, like CaptureOne, have a concept of a session, and store all settings for all images in the session in a sesssion folder, managed by a session file. Most, if not all, at least try to impose their own organisation solution on you, CaptureOne in particular. The latest idea, embodied in Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom, is to hide all this complexity from the user in a database-indexed file structure. In any case, what this means is that any work you do on a RAW image prior to converting it to a "fixed" format is essentially invisible outside of the converter environment it was created in. I cannot open a RAW file adjusted in CaptureOne in Lightroom and expect to see the effect of the adjustments (although when I first used Lightroom I was sufficiently flummoxed by the default settings to think that it was applying them!). I cannot browse a catalogue of RAW images in an application such as iView Media Pro and see any effect of such adjustments - even in the case of CaptureOne, which benefits from strong cross-marketing with iView. In fact, iView & PhaseOne have had to come up with some laughably convoluted suggested workflows to try to convince us that their association currently is anything other than marketing. So, in the past, when I could manage by digital assets from raw scan onwards in one place, now I cannot, and since there is a shift towards adjusting images prior to RAW conversion rather than afterwards, much of the power of a Digital Asset Management application is lost. In fact, if you want to use two or three alternative converters, then really you're on the road to Chaos City. Aperture can, and so we're told, Lightroom will, offer to sort all this out for us by integrating an end-to-end workflow, from RAW through to print. Aperture has some excellent ideas in the versioning, sorting and management front, and I daresay Lightroom will get around to copying, er, sorry integrating them soon. This is all well and good, providing you can meet two conditions: 1: you're starting with a blank slate 2: you're perfectly happy with the built-in RAW converter and always will be The first condition makes the reasonable assumption that once you've chosen a management solution, you don't want to use another one. However, say you have 10,000 RAW files currently in CaptureOne sessions. Either you're going to essentially treat them as history, and manage only the processed output files, thus throwing away the benefits of RAW, or you're going to have to bring them in to Aperture, one by one, and reapply settings to all of them - which, of course, are anyway going to take on a different characteristic to CaptureOne. This is a major pain, but I suppose it isn't a showstopper. The second, though, is more dangerous. For any pro or serious amateur photographer, a digital catalogue is a vital tool. These integrated tools offer great catalog functions, and you could soon be managing large libraries within them, discarding iView or Portfolio or Cumulus. But... what are going to do when iView launch MediaCapture 5, the fully integrated iView/PhaseOne tool which, all reviewers agree, offers outstanding, un-rivalled RAW conversion, with beautiful colour and detail ? Spend 6 months migrating ? Only to come back out of your computer room, haggard and blinking, to read news of Adobe's new Lightroom 8, which kills MediaCapture stone dead ? In the midst of the hype surrounding Lightroom and the associated, way over the top, vicious kicking of Aperture, raising these issues just opens me up to ridicule and insults on various forums. We shall see. Much as I would love to use either of these tools (and I do use Lightroom at present for LX-1 RAW), I am very wary of getting locked in. I'm sure companies like Extensis and iView are aware of both the problem and opportunity of the plethora of RAW converters, and I hope they'll come up with a solution - honestly, I'd find it much more useful if iView managed CaptureOne sessions rather than fonts - where RAW developers are essentially recast as plugins. Maybe we'll even seen a portable metadata standard format emerge, but I'm not holding my breath. There isn't really a solution to all this yet, unless it is to select one RAW converter and stick with it, or to accept that cataloging starts after the RAW conversion (more or less my current approach). Beware of integrated solutions. Mark my words, or surely thy Doom awaits.

So the annual feeding frenzy is underway, as lots of men in suits or corporate t-shirts show lots of other men in t-shirts and baseball caps what gadgets (possibly draped over women) (the gadgets, not the men) they can start dreaming about for the next few months. Yes, it's PMA time over in Orlando FL. The Olympus on-line community has been more worked up than most, since it appears that we're falling way behind in the bragging stakes. Olympus seem to have a corporate strategy well and truly focused on the first time buyer in the DSLR market, and since that is where the money is, it seems sensible. Except, unfortunately, to the rabid core Olympus cultists who spend every waling hour on internet forums, who would like, no, demand, a new high end mega camera (which few will buy, and even fewer use). Of course, the real professionals couldn't care less about the internet forums, even if they know they exist. If they need a new high end mega camera they'll go and buy one from whoever sells it, and deduct it from taxable income. And if an Olympus E-1 is good enough for them, well they'll just carry on making money with it. To be fair, for the advanced amateur there is little of real interest. The Panasonic L1 is a nice looking camera, but is probably not going come up to E-1 standards in areas like the viewfinder and ruggedness - although it looks as if it could be pretty solid. Still, it certainly shows that Panasonic have some very creative minds at work (unlike Samsung, for example). I have to say if I was a first time buyer, I might well find the Panasonic more attractive than the Olympus E-330. The Leica branded lens on the front of the L1 is interesting too, but whilst it may well have excellent optical quality, and it has image stabilisation, it is slower than the Olympus ZD 14-54, which certainly is optically excellent. So what the Leica lens gains on the swings it loses on the roundabouts, and the smaller aperture will mean a darker viewfinder image and probably reduced autofocus performance. It will be interesting to see how seriously Leica takes its membership in the 4/3rds consortium. So, what else ? Sigma have finally started producing some more interesting 4/3rds lenses, in particular the massive 100-500mm zoom, which gives a truly impressive 1000mm 35mm-equivalent telephoto. Well, yes, but at f6.3, and with a minimum shutter speed of 1/2000th handheld, it is going to be fairly useless off a tripod in anything other than bright sunlight. So probably it will be used at a minimum of ISO 400, which is pushing the limits of current 4/3rd sensors if you want high resolution results - which most customers of this lens will be looking for. Ok, it is about 1/6th of the price of the Olympus ZD 300mm 2.8, the longest lens so far available for the E-System, and, possibly, it doesn't need to be used at 500mm, so some light can be recovered, so it is worth considering. The Sigma 150mm f2.8 looks interesting too, and possibly more of a competitor to the Olympus ZD 150 f2.0. Anyway, I hope these lenses actually turn up in shops, so they can be tried out. I've never seen a Sigma 4/3 lens in the wild, as far as I recall. Anyway, it seems that a high resolution, low noise, pro-level Olympus body is as far away now as it has ever been. If and when it does turn up, I might still be interested, but the camera I could just, feasibly, afford to be smooth talked into in the PMA showroom is the Pentax 645 Digital. I'd be a far more talented photographer with that!

I was pleased (and a little surprised) to recently discover that the Lensbaby "creative" lens is available for the FourThirds mount. I just had to try it. The idea of putting a bad-by-design lens on the front of an expensive DSLR is too appealing to pass up. Although, to be fair, the Lensbaby is actually well designed, well built, and a genuine creative tool. To some extent it is a fully flexible tilt/shift lens, but not really. Basically it is a lens with a "sweet spot", a small area of sharp focus, which softens and distorts away from this spot. By moving the lens around (essentially, it consists of a flexible tube with a piece of glass at the front), this sweet spot can be moved around. This makes it predictable and repeatable, unlike, say, a Holga, although admittedly the "repeatable" part might be pushing things a little. It isn't particularly easy to use at first. Obviously, it has to be used in full manual mode. Focus is achieved by compressing and holding the tube, usually easier said than done. With a viewfinder of lesser quality than the Olympus E-1, it could get very difficult - probably it is much easier with a 35mm camera. At maximum aperture (f2.0) the depth of field is very shallow, making it even harder. And yes, you can change the aperture, by the ingeniously simple method of snapping on a series of magnetically fixed masks. Although it is easy to go overboard with the Lensbaby, forgetting that any creative tool, including this one, should not control you rather than you control it, it is both fun and rewarding. To see some really creative uses of a Lensbaby, look here.

After nearly two years with the E-1, I think I have finally made some progress on how to extract maximum sharpness from RAW files. It is often said that E-1 RAW images can take a lot of sharpening. Exactly why this is the case I guess depends on several factors, but my own experience tends to back this up. Until now, my workflow has been to process images from RAW to TIFF using CaptureOne, but disabling all sharpening. I then sharpen in Photoshop, using a capture sharpern / output sharpen method supported by Pixelgenius Photokit Sharpener. Over time I have tried various tricks, such as increasing the opacity of the sharpening layers, or duplicating the capture sharpen step (a suggestion from one of the Pixelgenius team). Recently though, I read a commentary on RAW sharpening by Alain Briot at Digital Outback, which got me thinking. Alain's method was to capture sharpen in the RAW converter, using Photokit for output sharpening. Since here he was using CaptureOne (before he sold out to RawShooter 😊 ), I decided to try it myself. I have been reluctant to use RAW converter sharpening in the past, due to several factors. First, it isn't so clear how well the algorithms compare with Photoshop, and the level of control, and especially of documentation is poor or non-existent. Second, it is equally unclear if sharpening is done as part of the RAW conversion process, so somehow able to work with a level of information detail not available in an output TIFF, or if it is applied post-processing, and finally because various "gurus" say not to. However, if it is good enough for Alain Briot, it is certainly good enough for me. The next question is "how much sharpening do I need". What I want is to apply enough to bring out detail and minimise the softness introduced in the RAW conversion, but I don't want to overdo it, I want to see detail, but I don't want to see the kid of obvious sharpening I would see in a file prepared for printing. The only way to find out is to try it. So I did. I am a bit dubious about the value of the image below. It is difficult to appreciate much from a small uploaded JPEG. However, the fragment on the left was sharpened in CaptureOne, with sharpening settings Amount:0 Threshold:2 (yes, there is a big difference between 0 and "disable"). The one on the right is with CaptureOne sharpening disabled, and PhotoKit Sharpener's Digital MedRes, Medium Edge Sharpen capture sharpener. The sharpening is actually almost identical, although I'd give a slight edge to CaptureOne. But what is far more noticeable, at least when I look closely in Photoshop, is that Photokit is introducing a slight "smearing" effect, as well as some edge effects. I can boost the sharpening level in CaptureOne without introducing any such artifacts, but more to the point, their presence will have an effect on further output sharpening. I should make it clear that I consider Photokit to be excellent, and I will certainly use it for capture sharpening of scans, and output sharpening of everything. And it could be that this result could be changed with fine tuning, and also that it is very specific to the E-1 (although Alain Briot doesn't use an E-1). I'm also not going to reprocess every E-1 image I have on file. But in future, I will capture sharpen in CaptureOne, and if I'm making large prints of existing images, I may well go back to the RAW and reprocess.