I sometimes play with Adobe's new profiles for Olympus bodies, the camera natural/camera muted/camera vivid/camera portrait profiles but I have no idea how close those profiles are to the profiles with the same name in the camera nor do I care. I have no idea how closely my result would compare to any of the picture modes on my camera and I don't really care, I do tinker with hue, saturation and luminance for particular colours at times, and I also play with vibrance but tend to keep that at fairly low levels. In fact I quite often have no precise idea of what kind of a result I want when I start processing, I start by getting the exposure and contrast looking right and just keep moving step by step. I don't find the natural or muted modes really accurate, and I don't find Adobe Standard in Lightroom really accurate either, but I'm happy to start with Adobe Standard as a starting point and work from there to a result I like. Not everyone wants results that look like Olympus's view of things, however. Olympus Viewer will always get you that kind of look a lot easier than Lightroom or another program. That can be difficult and sokar's right, his process takes less work but he's also choosing to get something in Olympus Viewer that's close to what he can see in the camera as his result. You have to work out how Olympus achieve the look you were looking at in the viewfinder and process the image to get that result all on your own. You can get the same result in Lightroom but you have to get there yourself. Other applications don't try to do that, and they also don't know what Olympus does in camera to process the RAW data to get those different picture mode 'looks'. Not only that, because Olympus make Olympus Viewer and because they know exactly what their in camera processing does, they can achieve that result precisely. Olympus Viewer effectively assumes that you want your final image to look like the picture mode you chose would look if the camera converted the image to JPEG for you. Olympus Viewer uses that data in it's processing of the RAW data to create the initial image it displays as a starting point whereas other applications do not. That choice controls part of the camera's internal JPEG conversion process for creating straight out of camera JPEGs and how your LCD screen/viewfinder image looks. natural/vivid/muted/portrait/monochrome/dramatic tone art filter and so on. Part of the metadata recorded by the camera is the picture mode you set in the menu, e.g. The initial image shown in every case is just a starting point, it's one idea of the RAW data. Some applications try to make it more like they think you would want it to look so that you might be able to get away with a little less work in processing, some try to display something that looks more 'neutral' as a starting point so that you need to make the major decisions yourself. There are other processes that need to be done too before you can be shown an image that looks something like what you photographed.ĭifferent RAW conversion programs display the initial image they show you differently because the programmers made different decisions about how best to display the RAW data as an image for you to work on. how bright the scene at that sensor pixel was, and even that measurement is useless on it's own because it's either the red, blue or green luminance value due to the Bayer sensor and a process called demosaicing has to occur first before a specific colour can be assigned to that pixel. Things have to happen before you can view the RAW data as an image because all that is recorded for each pixel on the sensor is luminance data, i.e. RAW files aren't image files like a JPEG. Not to say sokar's process is wrong but I think some comments about RAW conversion and how things look in a particular application are necessary.

There may be little difference or there could be a lot. How much difference there will be between an out of camera JPEG and a RAW file processed on your computer depends on how good your exposure was, and how good your JPEG settings for the camera are as opposed to how good your processing skills are in the RAW conversion program you choose to use. If you export the RAW file to your computer (and you can only do that as a RAW file, you can't do it in JPEG format) and process it in an application which uses non-destructive processing like Olympus Viewer, Lightroom, Aperture, Adobe Camera RAW, that program will export JPEGs when you want them but it will keep the RAW file unaltered and you can go back and re-edit the original data at any time, once again using non-destructive processing.

The RAW data is thrown away by the camera after it creates an in camera JPEG. A JPEG is a processed version of that data in a lossy compression data format. A RAW file contains the complete data captured by the sensor during exposure.

Olympus viewer 3 copy settings