So after some more serious play with the OMD, I think I finally figure out a way that it puts the DR of the sensor to better use on an average case at night. ARGH that took forever. Part of the puzzle is something I saw myself experimenting with but that dpreview to my surprise put in concrete terms- which is shooting at a lower ISO then pushing back, and the camera may still show good detail in shadow but good recovery in highlights.
Turns out the OMD EM5 MKII (and I bet EM1 and EM5) have a nice shadow range but can clip highlights with the standard matrix metering a bit easy.
And so far the cure I have found- Go to:
Wrench Menu-> Utility-> Exposure shift-> Set Matrix Metering (Olympus 'ESP" metering) to -1.
From then on if you develop a raw in-camera, develop with +1 EV back and in other raw converters same thing. You should now have a nice range of highlights to work with while the shadows are surprisingly good.
To think of this another way- the shadow areas you develop back up at the time of shooting, if you shot at ISO 800 with the exposure shifted -1 ev, that would be an ISO 1600 equivalent when developing back up. And we know the OMD does reasonably well at ISO 1600 so those areas that are shifted up that way, within reasonable ISO's should present no concerns.
Here's a scene I was having a hard time getting "in range" of the camera with the normal metering, after the final development and the same scene with EV -4 to show all the highlights detail. Shown using Capture One 8.3.2
Max extreme highlight recovery (ev -4).
Below a bottle in a bar, in very low red-led light, at ISO 1600 (pushed back to 3200) and the last one an ISO 10,0000 (!) pushed up back to ISO 20,000 (!!).
What this buys you is a relatively care free metered scene with a nice highlight range. Highlight range I was frustrated I wasn't getting.
Of course doing an exposure to the right using "blinkies" works best but for fleeting scenes, this is pretty good.
- Ricardo