New working flow

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

Comments

[djoule]

A big drama for me here : i changed my camera from canon 600D to fuji x-pro1 and dxo doesn't support the fuji raw files :-(

I think i'll have to switch to lightroom some day though i can't help hoping dxo will make a move towards fuji users...

Dxo is really amazing for raw development. Beyond fuji support, it only lacks area lightning possibilities (though i'm not fond of correcting onlyt one area of my pictures)