Different camera RAW may perform differently in one converter or the others.
Your experience in A1 could mean its own converter is not doing a good job.
With E-1 I didn't see different in resolution at low ISO at least with the
four RAW converters I just put in test. At high ISO the Olympus Viewer is
suffering from lost of details in low contrast noise area, my experience is
this can be solved with Olympus Studio's false color suppression feature.
If you care about resolution, get a E-300 for the type of job you need
better resolution. I did a comparison with E-1, the E-300 provide a much
sharper image. The Olympus Viewer cannot trun off sharpening like in E-1 but
in CS2 it can, eliminate any unwanted sharpening artifacts. The E-300 is a
very good investment at current price, if you can stick with ISO100 or 200
it is a great camera.
C.H.Ling
----- Original Message -----
From: "AG Schnozz" <agschnozz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <olympus@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 1:26 AM
Subject: [OM] Re: Photoshop RAW converter question (now RSE)
>> The default setting of RSE has very strong sharpening. Ok, at
>> the same time they keep the sharpen artifacts in good
>> control. Even I set the output -50 (minimum position) but
>> there is still some sharpening done.
>
> I did notice that. It came to light on my first test image when
> I was cranking settings to extremes to figure out what all they
> did. Lo and behold I was getting halos when I thought the
> sharpening was turned off. That's when I found the default
> camera settings and wrestled the sharpening there. That took
> care of the halos no matter how much I destroyed the image after
> that.
>
> There are physical limits to how much detail you can wrangle out
> of a RAW file. You can't change the law of physics. However
> each RAW converter does the demoisiac ever so slightly different
> and deals with the AA filter in unique ways. I'll be doing some
> test chart stuff this weekend, hopefully, and get a handle on
> just what and where these differences are.
>
> I have one real problem image taken with the A1 (trainyard and
> capital building) that has a lot of nasty alaising artifacts in
> it. Due to the converging lines and tight repeating patterns,
> this image is a worse-case example of a "res chart in the wild".
> (a film version of the image appeared in TOPE 20). My first
> attempt at using RSE on the image resulted in a tremendous
> increase in resolution (the bugaboo of the Ax cameras) but
> didn't help the artifacts any. No better, but no worse either.
> Converted in the Minolta software the image is soft and needs
> three-pass sharpening to be usable, but the edges are straight
> and the pixels line up and no PF is visible. The artifacts, when
> you can see them, are rainbow colored. When converted in
> Elements 3.0, the image is sharper but PF shows up and the
> artifacts are rainbow colored. Converted in VueScan there are
> zigzags as the demoisiac algorithm appears to be off by 1/2 to 1
> pixel every other line. The artifacts (as recorded by the
> sensor) are more visible and can only be disguised by adding HSM
> noise to the image. In RSE, the pixels are lined up perfectly,
> PF is pretty much non-existent and there are details showing up
> that I've never seen before--not even in the Velvia version!
> The artifacts (as recorded by the sensor) are still there, but
> strangly different as they are more monochromatic rather than
> rainbow colored. What is most interesting, is the sensor noise
> in the RSE images is present, but much tighter and
> monochromatic. A slight bit of luminous noise reduction softens
> that noise without trashing too much detail. In all other
> converters, the noise is colored and responds to color noise
> reduction instead of luminous noise reduction.
>
> Now, how does this translate to E-1 images? Not sure yet. I
> love the colors that the Olympus software gives me, but the
> images seem to be resolution limited by the AA filter. As I was
> converting 175 images last night (all of which had already been
> converted using Olympus Viewer) I noticed on a couple specific
> images the lack or change in noise. Just like the A1 pictures,
> the noise appeared to be more luminous (gritty) than color in
> the RSE images.
>
> Is this an improvement? Well, for landscape images, I do
> believe so. However, earlier in the evening, while I was still
> learning the ins and outs of the program and processed a couple
> wedding pictures. The gain in texture details in fabric and
> hair was offset by a marked change in skintones. The change in
> the noise pattern from color to luminous caused a cadaver look
> to erupt from the skin. Instead of a nice healthy pinkish glow,
> the skin turned more gray. When viewed at 100%, an E-1 image
> (when converted in-camera or in Viewer/Studio) tends to have a
> colorful splotchy noise pattern that is "film like". Seriously,
> take a close look at Portra films and you'll see the dye-clouds
> that give the same splotchy noise. The RSE version seemed to
> lose that colorful splotchy look and replaces it with brightness
> noise instead.
>
> The only comparison I can think of is Ektachrome 400. The grain
> is very gritty, but not colored. However, Kodak gold 400 has
> colorful grain, but doesn't have the same gritty look.
>
> Much more testing to be done. I'm hoping that this discussion
> sparks interest in other list-members to also do testing and
> contribute to the joint learning session which is the OM list.
>
> AG
==============================================
List usage info: http://www.zuikoholic.com
List nannies: olympusadmin@xxxxxxxxxx
==============================================
|