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Raw workflow with the E-P1?

Rawfa

Active member
Ok, so I'm testing a trial version of Lightzone that CAN open E-P1 raw. I want to get the best possible quality so that latter I may work with the image on Photoshop with all my plugins and stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong but what I should be doing is fine tuning the image to get the most possible detail and dynamic range, and the less possible amount of grain. Then latter I should export it as a 16bit tiff file and just take it from there on Photoshop. Is this all correct or should I be doing something else?
 

nostatic

New member
Ok, so I'm testing a trial version of Lightzone that CAN open E-P1 raw. I want to get the best possible quality so that latter I may work with the image on Photoshop with all my plugins and stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong but what I should be doing is fine tuning the image to get the most possible detail and dynamic range, and the less possible amount of grain. Then latter I should export it as a 16bit tiff file and just take it from there on Photoshop. Is this all correct or should I be doing something else?
If you don't want grain I don't think the E-P1 is the right camera unless you're going to shoot iso200 all the time (and even then it doesn't look like an APS-C file).

Actually one reason I really like it is due to the look of the grain.
 

pellicle

New member
sounds about right to me

if you have an open mind, you could try using photomatix to convert your RAW to a HDR file which you can then:
  • do a little bit of tone mapping to and then open in photoshop
  • open it in photoshop where local area contrast and sharpening can be applied

the nasty effects on the shadows only occur when applying excessive tone mapping (which seems to be quite the flavour of the month)

I apply this workflow to almost all my images now as I've found it gives a film like look without the grain. For instance:



there was no other way to get the little guy's eye visible without careful dodge n burn in layers ...
 

pellicle

New member
Hi

thanks for the link ... I liked the table ... and the ending:

I'd like to thank Michael Tapes of Phase One and Thomas Knoll of Adobe for their feedback and contributions toward this article. If there are any novel insights to be found here it is likely as a result of their feedback. If there are any factual errors they are likely mine.

— Mchael Reichmann
I guess that one of the errors would be spelling his name wrongly ;-)
 

jonoslack

Active member
Hi Rafa
I still think that using a traditional RAW workflow:

Raw file - converter - tiff file - product
is a horrible way of working (I should know, I did it for years).

The two pieces of DAM software: Lightroom and Aperture (and to a lesser extent Capture one). Save the changes you make to the RAW files in either a sidecar file (Capture one and ACR/Bridge)) or in a database (lightroom and Aperture). It means that you only need to keep one copy of the RAW file - only using output when you actually need it for a web page or a file for a client.

I'm sure that you should at least think and examine going down this route before you make any decisions.

Deciding how to do your RAW workflow is really quick and easy - changing it later is really slow and difficult.

The fact that neither lightroom or aperture yet support the E-P1 is not very relevant - I'm sure that they will (at least, lightroom is a certainty). Capture one is going to as well.

You could, to get you going, download the 30 day capture one trial, do the easy hack to get it to read the E-P1 files, by the time it's expired there should be more choices, but C1 does a grand job now.

Personally? I use Aperture - and with cataloguing for 24,000 images changing now would be a horrible job, still, it's only problem is slow support for new cameras.

Take time to make up your mind!
 

Rawfa

Active member
Thanks, Jono. For years I've shot with the simplicity of JPEG, so RAW is a brand new world for me. One additional thing that REALLY bothers me is the fact that Windows doesn’t let you preview the raw files...this means having a dedicate program for doing so instead of simply looking inside a folder.
As for the workflow I have no doubt that any will give me more quality than the jpegs I've been working with.
 

pellicle

New member
One additional thing that REALLY bothers me is the fact that Windows doesn’t let you preview the raw files...
ok ... going out on a limb here:
  1. dcraw has a extract thumbnails ( -e ) command line option, I use this with to create a bunch of .thumbnail.jpg images which are also made using the default. This allows me to romp through them all then see what the camera did with its settings and I can use that as some reference on how I start processing
  2. irfanview has an option to load the thumbnails in some raw files ...

as to:

As for the workflow I have no doubt that any will give me more quality than the jpegs I've been working with.
depending on things they may not ... if you get more things right in the JPG and don't need to edit I think it'd be hard to really improve on it ... except perhaps the gamut output of your final printing media may strech the sRGB gamut in some cases and introduce noise... I had this with a red wedding dress.

@johno

a good point about RAW processing. I was first made aware of this the first wedding I did in RAW when I had batches of indoor and outdoor stuff to process. Wanted a swag done one way for the lighting , and another batch for the outdoor colour balance. saving the xmp data is handy
 
T

thearne3

Guest
Hi Rafa

Personally? I use Aperture - and with cataloguing for 24,000 images changing now would be a horrible job, still, it's only problem is slow support for new cameras.

Take time to make up your mind!
I use Aperture as well. I gather that there are no ways to hack Aperture? What is your RAW flow while waiting for Aperture?

Thanks,
Tom
 

jonoslack

Active member
I use Aperture as well. I gather that there are no ways to hack Aperture? What is your RAW flow while waiting for Aperture?

Thanks,
Tom
HI Tom
You might easily be able to hack Aperture as well, but it's a bit complex as the raw.plist file concerned is (these days) 'self repairing', so you have to do stuff in terminal as well. I did find a message somewhere about it, and I certainly used to do it with the M8. I'm sure if you can find an easy way there would be lots of grateful folk around here . . . me included!

As for now; my recent stuff has been weddings and a concert, none of which really suited the E-P1. I've mostly been shooting jpg with it, if I really want to shoot RAW then I'll use Capture One (which does a good job) and then produce tiff's for aperture. I don't mind doing it for a month or so, but not longer than that I hope. In the longer term, if Apple don't do support, then I'll get rid of the camera (with much regret) - but I don't think it'll come to that.
 

jonoslack

Active member
Thanks, Jono. For years I've shot with the simplicity of JPEG, so RAW is a brand new world for me. One additional thing that REALLY bothers me is the fact that Windows doesn’t let you preview the raw files...this means having a dedicate program for doing so instead of simply looking inside a folder.
As for the workflow I have no doubt that any will give me more quality than the jpegs I've been working with.
Hi Rafa
I think it's worth the effort of changing, and my workflow is no more complicated with raw than it would be with jpg (using Aperture), in fact, it's exactly the same!

As for the RAW file preview - I think it's coming in Windows 7 isn't it? Or, of course, you could really throw the cards up in the air and get a mac!
 

nostatic

New member
I am mostly shooting jpg until Aperture gets an update. HOpefully it won't be like the DLUx4 which is still NOT supported by Aperture. That said I agree with Jono 100% - Aperture makes like very simple and there is no difference between shooting raw and jpg. It is one-stop-shop from transfer to print.

But the wait does suck. It seems to be related to cameras that do a lot of processing internally. The DLux4 fixes barrel distortion and the E-P1 fixes that along with some other things I think. Thankfully RawDeveloper quickly supports cameras but they don't do any auto-correction.
 

jonoslack

Active member
I am mostly shooting jpg until Aperture gets an update. HOpefully it won't be like the DLUx4 which is still NOT supported by Aperture. That said I agree with Jono 100% - Aperture makes like very simple and there is no difference between shooting raw and jpg. It is one-stop-shop from transfer to print.

But the wait does suck. It seems to be related to cameras that do a lot of processing internally. The DLux4 fixes barrel distortion and the E-P1 fixes that along with some other things I think. Thankfully RawDeveloper quickly supports cameras but they don't do any auto-correction.
Hi there
I bet one can hack the raw.plist file, duplicate the E-30 and then change it to E-P1, unfortunately I'm a bit busy at the moment, and, having just appointed myself to the job of 'telling nostatic what to do' I'm deputing you to sort out the Aperture fix:ROTFL::ROTFL:

I suspect that Apple have simply been hoping that lens correction goes away, but I think they'll have to support the E-P1. Here's Hoping. One thing worth mentioning is that the Olympus kit zoom doesn't seem to have as much lens correction information as the pana lenses - which means that not having it doesn't seeem to be that much of a hardship. Which means that this fix you're going to organise will be really useful :p:)
 

Rawfa

Active member
Jono, you are absolutely right. Converting the ORF files to TIFF is just crazy. I'm ending up with 70mb per photo! What really sucks is that I cannot get the ORF files converted to either RAW or PSD (Photoshop project file). I've tried with Lightzone and with the program that comes with the E-P1 and I couldn't find the option. I'm not going to buy an application just so that I may do this. Is there any way around this? I really want to start using raw now.
 

Brian Mosley

New member
Hi Rafa,

Lightzone can open E-P1 raw files, but it isn't tuned yet to support them natively - you should find that they are massively underexposed and colour shifted.

The new version should be available shortly - unless you're testing an unreleased beta?

Kind Regards

Brian
 

Rawfa

Active member
The thing is, whatever program I use to open the ORF files I want to be able to convert them to RAW or PSD so that I may treat the images on Photoshop. And neither Lightzone nor Oly's Master 2 can do this (unless I'm mistaken...which I hope I am).
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
The thing is, whatever program I use to open the ORF files I want to be able to convert them to RAW or PSD so that I may treat the images on Photoshop. And neither Lightzone nor Oly's Master 2 can do this (unless I'm mistaken...which I hope I am).
You cannot *convert* .ORF files to RAW files ... .ORF files are RAW files. Only the camera creates .ORF RAW files.

You convert .ORF files to PSD or TIFF files ... those are RGB-channel organized, de-mosaicked, gamma corrected files ready for editing. (JPEG files should be used for output and display only, not for editing.) Preferably 16bit per channel representation.

There's little difference whether you output from .ORFs as TIFF or PSD files. Both LightZone and Olympus Master 2 can output to 16-bit TIFF files.
 

Rawfa

Active member
Thanks, Godfrey. I'm new to RAW so I thought there were different compressors (orf being the one used by Oly) that could be converted to more compatible ones. The reason I don't want to convert to TIFF is because the files are huge (although I have no idea how big an ORF file converted to PSD would be).
 
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