E-P1 Raw processing

[davidpet]

I'm saving up (over the next 10 months or so) to buy a camera and right now am strongly leaning towards the Olympus E-P1. I just wanted to know if the RAW images shot by that camera include enough metadata that you could create TIFF images that look like the JPEG. From the reviews online, it seems to be indicated that you get pure sensor data with no other information and have to reinvent the wheel every picture. I just want RAW so that information isn't pre-lost to compression before saving and editing the picture, but I'd like to be able to apply things like ISO and white balance in-camera and not have to write it down for every picture so that I can manually adjust it in software and never feel like taking pictures in RAW again. Do E-P1 .ORF files do this, and can Adobe apply it correctly? If not, what's a similar-featured camera where I can get what I'm looking for? thanks

[davidpet]

also, I am new to this all (my current camera is an olympus d-545 ancient point and shoot) so if the reason I can't find this info is that it's so trivially known that people would get laughed at for mentioning it in reviews, I apologize, but it's a huge thing to know before spending that much money for me, so I can't leave it hanging open :-)

[LeeR]

I am not sure I understand your question. RAW means you are getting exactly what the camera records without any white balance or any other settings. If you want to use settings in-camera, as you indicate, then you are going to need to shoot in JPEG. I can't speak for other programs, but in PS it is easy to apply a predetermined set of parameters, either those suggested by the program or your own. For instance, if you set up a portrait session maintaining the same lighting throughout, you can open the first RAW image, adjust the settings to your liking and then apply all of those settings to the rest of the images from the session. Keep in mind, when you process RAW you are telling the computer how interpret the the unprocessed data (Parametric changes) in any other format you are making changes to saved data. That's one of the reasons RAW processing is so powerful. Once you like what you are seeing you can save it to whatever format you like, including TIFF, but any time you want you can go back to the original ORF file and tell the program to interpret the data differently. Does that help?

[davidpet]

Wikipedia claims that RAW files have metadata in them that tells what the camera settings were (like white balance) but just doesn't apply them to the pixels yet so that when you load in the RAW file you can either disregard these or start with them and then adjust it for more control. It sounds like this article may be out of date or specific to a certain brand since I haven't seen this claim made anywhere but wikipedia. It would have been really nice to have that since I know I'm not going to trust myself to conjure up all these settings myself manually, especially white balance and sharpness. When I got my new tv I spent hours and hours trying to decide the color balance and finally gave up and went back to factory settings. I don't think it'll be good for me to have this kind of experience on the first photo of any shooting session...haha.

I do think that would be interesting for its own sake when I have some basic skill under my belt, but my current reason for wanting RAW was because I"m learning photoshop and I don't like the idea of the source material already losing information to compression before I do anything to it. Is jpeg in modern cameras good enough that this isn't a problem? Should I just shoot in jpeg+raw and try to match the raw to the jpeg as a way to duplicate the camera settings in uncompressed form? Please advise

[ravncat]

The ORF files - Olympus Raw Format (file>?)

They will work just fine in ACR or olympus master suite etc - and be the RAW file you want them to be. Allowing you to do as thought.

(In reality very few raw formats are actually 100% raw data )