Olympus E-5 Photos From RAW - Finally

[Photo-John]

I've been shooting with the Olympus E-5 for a few weeks now but wasn't able to start playing with the RAW files until this weekend. As I thought, Olympus Master hasn't been updated to correctly handle the E-5 RAW files. It opens the files but won't process them correctly. Olympus had me use Olympus Viewer 2 to process the E-5 RAW files and that worked fine. Like the reast of the Olympus software, it's nowhere near as powerful, quick or intuitive as Lightroom. But that's the price you pay when you get a camera this early.

I'm sharing a few of the images I've processed from the RAW here. This still isn't what I consider a review, but these are solid, final images. I don't have any questions about the JPEG processing or anything else with these since I shot them RAW and past experience gives me faith that the Olympus software RAW processing output quality is as good as Lightroom, even if the interface is a bit clunky.

I'm only posting small versions here on the forum. But I'm uploading higher resolution to my gallery. Some of them are even full-res so you can pixel peep away. In particular, the images of Jenni at the laptop and the Firehouse sandwich shop are both handheld ISO 1600 images with no noise reduction. Well, nothing more than the software's defaults, anyway. So far I'm really impressed. There is ocassionally a problem with too much red saturation. But the overall image quality is excellent with plenty of highlight and shadow detail. Noise does seem to be much better than previous Olympus bodies. I am pleased to note that ISO 1600 seems entirely useable - possibly even better than my Canon EOS 7D.

Next up are my controlled studio tests. I've been shooting a ton with this camera over the past week and I'm getting a good feel for it. If you've got questions about it, posts them here. I've got a list and I'll do my best to answer everyone in my full review.