Sometimes the differences are subtle, but they are still definitely there. Lightroom on left, Olympus Viewer 3 on right. And this was a trend that continued shot after shot. Lightroom Tiff on left, Olympus Tiff on right.Īgain, the above comparison shows the Olympus Viewer 3 Tiff to be sharper, punchier, and yet truer in colour rendition. Whereas the Lightroom Tiff had obvious noise. Noise in the blue of the water in the above magnified crop is practically non-existent in the Olympus Tiff (shot at ISO 200). Blues are bluer and whites are whiter, whereas the Lightroom Tiffs introduce a slight colour shift.Īnd third, and again surprisingly (to me at least), the Olympus images have a lot less noise apparent in the image. And not just more accurate, but also more vibrant. Second, the colours of the Olympus rendered Tiff look more 'accurate' to me. So I was expecting that the Lightroom Tiffs would be sharper than Olympus's. Which is odd, and somewhat surprising, since I read somewhere recently that Lightroom adds about 25% sharpening by default to all its RAW conversions (since RAW images are 'softer' out of camera). First, the Tiff file from Olympus Viewer is much sharper that the one from Lightroom. It may be hard to see from the internet resolution, so I'll tell you what I see on my computer monitor in the comparison above. I should also mention that I shoot my RAW images with everything in-camera set to neutral. I simply opened the RAW file in the respective programmes and saved them out immediately. Nothing was touched, nothing was changed, no slider was moved. orf (Olympus Raw Format) file and 'process' it as a 16bit uncompressed Tiff file completely unaltered. So all I did to compare "apples with apples" was to take the RAW. Obviously in any RAW software you can tweak and alter an image to your hearts desire. Lightroom CC Tiff on the left, Olympus Viewer 3 Tiff on the right. Since I'm now in the market for a RAW processing programme, I though it might be time to look at Olympus's offering and compare it with the megalithic giant that is Adobe Lightroom. I was using Aperture, was very happy with it, and saw no reason to change. But then you'd have responses from others saying things like 'slow' and 'clunky' and I'd quickly move on. When I was a Canon shooter I would occasionally come across a post from a photographer extolling the virtues of using Canon's own proprietary RAW processing software. well that's where it gets very interesting. Surely that means that it can't be very good? It'll be slow, and clunky, and produce fairly average images? If, like me, you thought that would be the case, then you'd be right - about two of those three assumptions. You don't get much cheaper than free folks! When you're looking for 'cheaper' alternatives for a RAW converter, the first place you should really look is the manufacturers own software. Adobe isn't the only kid on the block anymore. So what's a man to do? Well if he's me, he starts looking around for alternatives. I could go down to the 'Photography' package of just Photoshop and Lightroom for about the same as I'm paying monthly at the moment for the whole suite - but I really want to have InDesign, Illustrator and Premier as well - which bumps me back up into that $50 a month bracket. Because there's no way I'm going to pay Adobe around $50NZ a month to rent their software! No way. And then I have some serious decisions to make. At the moment, I'm lucky enough to have the entire CC collection for a student rate. My workflow consists of Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw, with the final edits in Photoshop - all through my CC subscription. Having been an Aperture user, I'm obviously not adverse to taking the less popular option when it comes to software. But I don't actually have it installed on my computer at home - although it is installed on my machine at work. I have played around a bit in Lightroom, and I 'own' it as part of my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I preferred the Aperture user experience over Adobe's Lightroom, but alas, as we all know, Aperture is no more. I used to be an Aperture 3 user on the Mac.
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