Quick Insight: Olympus Workspace - Raw Editing

Unlike third party software product like Adobe Lightroom and others, Olympus Workspace often suffers from a lack of detailed explanation of how it works, what it does and how do you know what is happening on screen. Here's a quick tip on what Olympus Workspace displays on the screen when you start to edit a raw file.

When choose the thumbnail, the in-camera settings like Picture Mode are already pre-selected and the thumbnail of the raw shows the look straight out of camera (this could be read from the embedded jpeg inside each raw file). Note that Picture Mode is not ticked which means I have not yet made any edit choices on the computer

The thumbnail shows the text RAW on the top right. Olympus Workspace can stack the same numbered raw and jpeg to avoid clutter of the screen. In that case if there are two files, the text will be R+J

This thumbnail shows the Pencil icon on the top left corner - this means I have chosen to adjust something on the computer. My adjustments are stored as metadata in the central Olympus Workspace database on this computer. If I take the raw file to another computer, my adjustments will not be carried with it.

If I right click on the thumbnail, I am given the choice to "Revert To Original" - this is because adjustments to the raw file are not merged into the file, they remain separate as metadata and can be further adjusted or removed completely