Olympus - Raw Converter

[Admiral]

Hi Guys,

I have an Oly E3 and I am currently using Lightroom 1.4, but I am not having much success with Lightroom - the colors of my pictures are not as punchy as I think it should. I tried Oly's Studio, and the colors are great but the system is just agonizingly slow...

From your experience, which is your favorite RAW converter and DAM system for Oly's ORF files? It will be insightful to discover which programs you are using, and why prefer one over the other. Thanks.

[bousozoku]

There are probably 10 or so threads on this issue, but I can't say much as the search function didn't even find this thread.

I use Phase One Capture One version 4.x, but many people use Silkypix and Apple's Aperture is quite good, if you use a Mac. I'm surprised that Lightroom isn't better but then, I didn't like the way that the Photoshop plug-in worked, either.

[Fragment]

Lightroom 2.3 works for me.

[diCam]

I'm using:

1. Olympus Studio 2.2
2. Capture One 4.7
3. LightRoom 2.3

My personal opinion:

1. Olympus Studio can reproduce the true Olympus colour but it is slow and cumbersome. I use it for critical work only.

2. Capture One produce good skin tone but I find the GUI is not on the friendly side. The load-up and processing is fast. Faster than LR. Very much faster than OS.

3. LightRoom... good for GP purposes. GUI is friendly but it takes time to load a RAW file.

[SeineRiver]

I prefer Oly Studio which gives me the most correct color. Yes it's a bit slow, but just turn on your computer, do a batch conversion to 16-bit tiff or jpeg depends on your usage. Nevertheless, you'll going to use some other softwares to edit which sure take more time than conversion, so why bother about speed

[Admiral]

Thanks guys - appreciate your response. I tried Capture One version 4 earlier, and I find it pretty impressive - very nice colours and a rather intuitive system but what it lacks is the LR's "DAM" system...

[Evilmerlin]

I use Lightroom 2.3. Fast and efficient. Needs a bit of tweaking to get the colours but its so much faster and easier to use than Studio.

[microcosm]

Silkypix... always... for me at least... When used right produce the best colors.
More importantly, it does not generate another image and doubling the harddisk space.
Just a new XML metadata file containing the "tweaks" I have done to the image, non destructive.
My "tan jia" weapon for RAW developing for the colors. Not to mention :
- Extension of dynamic range
- Film saturation emulation
- Amazing lens correction capabilities
- Noise/Sharpness/Detail control
- Color correction like no other (high end colorist tools)

and....
Photoshop for manipulation and fine tuning... but never ACR (unless I am feeling super lazy)...