As you might know, Olympus recently released its 3rd version of Olympus Viewer (3.0). I was quite excited to test this new version, expecting some major relevant improvements. And I have to say I 've been terribly disappointed: there is NO significant improvement at all to my point of view. All the main drawbacks of this (very nice by the way) RAW processing software are unfortunately still there: extreme slowness, poor noise processing engine, limited image processing capabilities in general. 

I therefore decided to definitively switch to a more complete tool for my picture processing work flow, the contenders here being: Dxo optics pro, Lightroom and Capture one pro. After extensive testing of each of them, it was quite hard to make a choice since these are 3 excellent pieces of softwares. I first tended to go to Dxo for several reasons: nice interface from my point of view, excellent sharpening & perspective correction tools, powerfull plug-ins (Dxo Filmpack) for post-processing, French company^^. But one of the big cons of Dxo I experienced has been the relative slowness of the software when you are working at 100% zoom for noise reduction of sharpening  adjustement. This is absolutely not the case when you use Lightroom, that I finally chose. The other additional Lightroom advantages that drove this choice were: great picture management capabilities, soft proofing possible (almost mandatory for good prints), and last but not least,compatibility with a very high number of plug-ins.

Presently, my work flow is therefore mainly based on Lightroom 5 + Perfect Effect photo Suite 7, the later being an absolutely magic tool that can works as a plug-in in Lightroom. The only case where I still use Olympus Viewer is when I want to keep the famous Olympus "Dramatic tone" effect, which is the only Olympus effect that is extremely time consuming & difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce: in this case I simply apply the filter & export to Lightroom in TIFF format for further processing, like for the picture below.

So what can I add ? Well, that I'm 100% happy with this new powerfull combination, that I highly recommend !

Smoking Hulot