Tips and tricks for transition to m4/3rds?

[Derek Zeanah]

I feel like I'm in a weird place. I'm trying to transition from "best" to good enough as far as gear goes - I'm over 50, tend to do most of my photography on vacations, and I'm looking for a smaller, more convenient kit that's "good enough" but comfortable to carry.

Most prints will be viewed on screen only, but we do decorate the house with good vacation photos - so far 20x30 is the biggest, but I'm willing to go bigger with the right image.

So after looking around it seems that the m4/3rds is much more capable than I'd thought previously, and I picked up a trio of PanaLeica zooms that I think will meet my needs and a Panasonic camera.

Now I'm testing, and trying to determine if I'll actually be happy with the smaller, less capable gear before I make decisions about selling what I've got, or looking in another direction.

So I've come to y'all seeking guidance on tips and tricks to facilitate efficient testing, especially with regard to post-processing the images.

How do you (or did you) process these images to wring the most out of them? So far it looks like DxO Pure Raw helps at lot at the start of the processing chain, but I'm struggling with sharpening pre-print. I'm wondering if Lightroom can do this as well should I learn its capabilities, or maybe something like staged sharpening with Nik capture sharpening and then sharpening for output (or DxO Pure Raw with 'soft' settings, on import, then Topaz Photo Ai pre-print) makes more sense and gets be further down the road.

What do y'all do?

Are there any tips that I should be aware of as far as image capture is concerned?

I've been away from taking photography seriously for about a decade, and the tools are soooooo much more capable I feel like what I'd learned before has just been counterfeited by technology, so I'm re-learning from scratch.

 

[Derek Zeanah]

Well, I asked Grok and it came up with something similar to my limited experience:

• Start in DxO Pure Raw, without too much sharpening.
• Continue in Lightroom for most of the edits.
• Use Gigapixel if upsizing is needed. I'm not sure about this, as I don't know how much this matters nowadays. Will my ET-8550 upscale internally if sent (say) a 240dpi image? I assume printing services have good workflows that maximize the output on their machines, and they upscale if necessary. This is just an assumption though.
• Use Nik for output sharpening as the last step prior to printing.

I'll play, and tweak and figure out what seems to work for me.

 

[f6cvalkyrie]

What do y'all do?

Are there any tips that I should be aware of as far as image capture is concerned?

I use m4/3 gear since more than a decade … first Panasonic and now Olympus

A tip for image capture : avoid “mixed mariages”. Panasonic cameras work best with Panasonic lenses. Olympus lenses will work but you risk AF problems and some fonctionality may be lost especially in the field of computational photography.

I use Capture One for my RAW file editing and rarely feel the need for anything else …

I hope this helps

 

[Jorgen Udvang]

Here's my workflow for MFT cameras, currently G9, GX8 and G85, based on 15 years with the system:

- DxO PureRAW for noise removal, lens correction and general sharpening
- Adobe Camera RAW for exposure, colour and perspective adjustments
- Further adjustments in Photoshop, sharpening with Topaz AI Sharpener if necessary (Photoshop plugin)

After advice from Canon, I always change to exact dpi (300/600/1200 for most Canon printers and 360/720/1440 for Epson) and size before printing using Canon Professional Print & Layout (PPL). I do upsizing with Topaz Gigapixel AI and downsizing with Photoshop. In my experience, most print programs do a reasonable job upsizing, but Gigapixel is better.

It would be possible to do both sharpening and upsizing with Topaz Photo AI, but I don't like the user interface, and feel that I have better control using separate programs. Unfortunately, Topaz Sharpener isn't being updated anymore, and is misbehaving with recent versions of Photoshop.

Be aware that with Panasonic lenses, you will not get Dual IS with Olympus/OM bodies. Then there are the very different user interfaces. Some prefer Panasonic, some prefer Olympus. I use a mix of Panasonic and Olympus lenses (my most used lens is the Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8), and have never had a problem.