The Olympus PEN-F - part 5 of the personal narrative

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 precede this article.

Oogling with Olympus Viewer 3

A technically challenging shot below - a quick one in the middle of the famous Petaling Street intersection. I didn't think of in-camera HDR JPEG at that time. Neither did I think of exposure bracketing that Olympus models do so well.

SOOC JPEG shot with one of the Color Profiles

You can see that the semi hazy sky is bleached out. The reds are emphasised - I was probably using Picture Profile 3 which emulates a saturated slide transparency film. In Olympus Viewer metadata I can see that a picture profile has been executed and I can see the Color Wheel transform but I am not sure where to look for in a label that says "Picture Profile 3"

Processed with Olympus Viewer 3 Version 2

The one immediately above, I processed using Olympus Viewer and manually choosing options. I'm on a unspectacular, uncalibrated Acer notebook screen so that's another factor to consider.When I was processing this, I did not visually reference the SOOC JPEG. I was wanting to recover the bleached out building and the sky but this software + raw combination has limits.

Histogram after adjustments in Olympus Viewer 2

The Highlight, Midtone and Shadow Control Curve that both the camera and Olympus Viewer have

Exposure Compensation and the Color Wheel for the Color Profile adjustments

There doesn't seem to be much difference between the SOOC JPEG and Olympus Viewer if you are not especially skilled in working Olympus Viewer - that's both a pro and a con.

Lighting up with Lightzone

Out of interest, I tried the community maintained Lightzone. Lightzone is one of the few programs that currently read the raw file from the PEN-F. I tried some Zone System adjustments and the Re-lighting tool.

Lightzone Processed from raw

I don't know Lightzone will and was surprised at the almost flourescent pink/red it managed to render. Also notice the sky and the buildings, quite a massive recovery from the bleached out version from Olympus Viewer and SOOC JPEG.

Sassing it up with Sagelight Editor

Sagelight Editor is one of my favourites (a quietly unknown raw processor). It is authored by one sole developer/programmer and is very quick to launch. The only worry is that this author has gone AWOL - the website is there but the forum hasn't heard from him for a while. Currently, it is the other raw processor that will read a PEN-F raw file. Here's what it produced.

Sagelight Editor read the PEN-F raw file and I tweaked the image.

Sagelight Editor settings  that produced the image

The raw read by Sagelight Editor Before and After

So, three different software, different renderings (of course there's me, the human element)
Mike Boening says ON1 software now opens the PEN-F's raw.

On to Part 6