Olympus RAW - ACR 5.3 vs Olympus Master

silversx80

I'm a borderline perfectionist. Big whoop, wanna fight about it? I remember reading somewhere on the web that Adobe RAW doesn't handle Olympus RAF Files (.ORF) very well. I do like a lot of the features that ACR 5.3 offers, especially clarity and vibrance. Also, just the sheer options make me choose ACR over OM... until recently. I just started to notice some pretty severe banding, softness and loss of detail, so that led me to experiment. There isn't much of a wright-up here because I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves. I will give my conclusion, however.

Olympus Master is hands down, better than ACR when it comes to .ORF extensions. Although you have less options before you convert from .ORF to .jpg or .Tiff, the results are much sharper, cleaner and the color is smoother with less noticeable banding (results here that are not 100% crops have been compressed by mobile me and some extra banding has been the result). There is more "noise," but it is more closely related to "grain," and I'll take that over color-banding any day of the week. Also, ACR seems to have more ability to add contrast, but again, it's just not worth it when I can save as a .tiff and add that later.

Anyway, on to a series of pics and 100% crops. They were all cropped on Olympus Master, but half were processed from the .ORF extension in ACR and the other in OM. Everything was done to get the images to look the same.

ACR


OM


100% Crop ACR


100% Crop OM


ACR


OM


100% Crop ACR


100% Crop OM


ACR


OM


100% Crop ACR


100% Crop OM



ACR


OM


100% Crop ACR


100% Crop OM

jfriend

Do you realize that all the OM shots are brighter and noisier? A little hard to compare when there's that much difference in the chosen rendering.

Did you manually tweak the two RAW converters to achieve the best result in each? Or just accept their default rendering?

silversx80

jfriend wrote:

Do you realize that all the OM shots are brighter and noisier? A little hard to compare when there's that much difference in the chosen rendering.

Did you manually tweak the two RAW converters to achieve the best result in each? Or just accept their default rendering?

At default OM is much better, so I tried to tweak for best results from OM and match in ACR. Some factors were detail, color and noise. Color was the only thing I could come close on. As mentioned, however, there is more noise in the OM rendering, but it appears that ACR bands the noise together, along with the color and detail. If you look closely, you'll see splotches of noise from the ACR where OM produces a grain-like image.

Personally, I feel that if I have to tweak EVERY shot from my camera, I made a mistake. I make mistakes quite often.

The first three shots are pretty well similar with the brightness (at least on my monitor) and with both, the exact same EV was set on both. Same thing with the last pic, but OM is brighter. I'm not exactly sure what happened there.

... but, what I was trying to say is that there really is that much of a difference in the rendering. I feel that OM is better.

jfriend

silversx80 wrote:

At default OM is much better, so I tried to tweak for best results from OM and match in ACR. Some factors were detail, color and noise. Color was the only thing I could come close on. As mentioned, however, there is more noise in the OM rendering, but it appears that ACR bands the noise together, along with the color and detail. If you look closely, you'll see splotches of noise from the ACR where OM produces a grain-like image.

Personally, I feel that if I have to tweak EVERY shot from my camera, I made a mistake. I make mistakes quite often.

The first three shots are pretty well similar with the brightness (at least on my monitor) and with both, the exact same EV was set on both. Same thing with the last pic, but OM is brighter. I'm not exactly sure what happened there.

... but, what I was trying to say is that there really is that much of a difference in the rendering. I feel that OM is better.

There is one thing that some people like about the camera manufacturer's own RAW converters (same for Nikon and Canon too) and that's that they know the proprietary tags in the RAW file for the camera settings (contrast, saturation, color balance, custom curves, etc...) and they can apply those automatically to the RAW rendering as a default rendering. ACR does not do that for anything other than white balance - probably mostly because it's just too much of a burden to reverse engineer all these settings from all the manufacturers since they are all proprietary and, for the most part, not documented. If that gets you results you like, then there's no reason to not go that way.

My point was that it's hard for us to compare two renderings that are significantly different brightness as it's a bit of apples to oranges unless all you're trying to compare is default renderings.