Hi Guys,
Well, some may recall a few questions a couple of weeks ago about the
E-500 vs 20D, etc. After a lot of deliberation, I finally went with
Olympus ? but not the one I expected to. Was weighing up the E-500, but
was unsure of the small viewfinder. Then I tried the E-330. Much nicer
viewfinder ! The viewfinder being on the left rather than the middle
seemed strange, but when I tried it it just worked so well for me (I?m
left eyed & right handed). So I did it, and now I am the proud owner of
an E330, DZ14-45, and the DZ35 Macro. Oh, and the MA-1 which they threw
in for £25 (not quite free, but better than the £100 they seem to sell
for).
Anyway, I had hoped to announce my entrance into the digital world with
a flourish of lovely pictures. However, I have one problem standing in
my way. I have some which I am really proud of on the camera. I?ve
downloaded them to the PC. But damn it, why did Olympus have to package
such a good camera with such truly abysmal software ? Never have I used
an image editor so painfully slow and ineffective. And I have just
spent hours opening each raw file in turn, adjusting exposure and colour
balance to what I consider to be just right, then saving as TIFF. So I
go to open the TIFF files in PhotoShop, only to find that the colour is
TOTALLY different in PhotoShop. Couldn?t believe it at first, so opened
same file using Olympus ?Master?, and side by side the same files look
totally different. WTF ??
Then I googled for a PS Plug-In to open the RAW files. Figured that
would bypass the ?Master? software for good. But the free Olympus RAW
file plug-in for PS is actually WORSE ! I really didn?t think this was
possible, but it is. When you go to import the images, you can?t SEE
what you are importing ! And once you have imported your random image,
the PS Plug-In strips off the EXIF data for you ? jolly handy, that.
Nice work, lads, you?ve written a quality piece of code there.
As you may be able to detect, I?m a bit p?d off. Camera is great, just
want to be able to get the images out of it reliably and easily. So far
I have spent 14 hours trying to get approx. 75 images from the camera to
a useable state on my PC and I have nothing to show for it at all ? just
a load of very, very large files taking up hard-drive space and
containing foul-coloured images.
So, what do you guys all do ? What am I missing ? What am I doing
wrong ? Why are the images so different in PS compared to Olympus
Master ? Why can I not edit the Raw file in Olympus Master and save it
again as a Raw file ? (eg: I wanted to do the red-eye removal on a
couple of shots, then do the colour balance. Both these processes are
in different areas of the Olympus Master software, so I have to do the
red eye bit, then save as a TIFF, then how do I adjust colour balance on
the TIFF ?) Why is it taking so long ? I thought digital was supposed
to make photo-taking easy ? at this rate I?ll be spending a full day in
front of the PC for every hour I spend taking photos. Not quite what I
had in mind.
I hope you guys can tell me where I am going wrong. Right now I?m going
to bed before my eyes pop out of my head !
Jon
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