Olympus tuning

Hi all Olympus 30405060 owners,

I wonder about the sharpness, contrast and saturation settings. How are they set on your camera?

The manual suggests that sharpness and contrast should be lowered if you plan to edit the images on a computer, and increased if you are to print directly from the camera/memory.

Does flash or ambient light make a difference?

Ellen Muller (got the link from some thread here on WetPixel) has some great looking shots. She has set sharpening to its absolute minimum (-5), but has not adjusted contrast or saturation.

http://www.pbase.com/imagine/

She also set the exposure compensation to -2/3EV.

If I'm shooting at night; is there a difference between manipulating the exposure compensation or flash intensity? ...or, what is the difference?

/Anders

If you're shooting the camera in manual mode with manual flash, then the exposure compensation doesn't do anything.

I can't speak to the other questions as I have not shot the 5050 underwater.

Cheers

James

Ok, but what if I'm shooting in near total darkness with the camera set to mode "P" (auto-everything)?

In theory when shooting in total darkness in P mode, the camera will go for the lowest f-stop and the slowest shutterspeed it can get. Not a good combo if you plan on shooting with a strobe.

When shooting in total darkness with a strobe, a good starting point is perhaps f8 at 1/250th. Then adjust strobe power to get a good exposure.

Only one thing to adjust, so it's not that much harder than shooting in P mode. You will also want a flashlight/modelling light to help the camera focus.

Hope that helps,

James

Thanks, but you're too practical... ;-)

Perhaps what you're telling me is that it's a non-issue, and I should worry about something else.

So let's worry about the sharpness, contrast and saturation settings. The manual seems to suggest that increasing these parameters will/may give me a better looking image, but will reduce possibilities for future editing.

To what extent is this true?

If you've been experimenting with these parameters; how did they end up?

/Anders

Photo editing programs increase contrast by deleting half of the light and half of the dark pixels. That's what the in-camera software does too...

It's not much fun to throw away half (well that's a slight overstatement) of the photo information before it's even written to the card!

Cheers

James

Found a thread on DPReview where a few people seemed to agree on settings for the 5050:

sharpness -3

contrast -2

saturation +2

exposure +0.7

flash -0.7

I'll mix those numbers with Ellen's to:

sharpness -4

contrast -2

saturation +1

exposure 0

flash 0 (Ikelite Manual controller, and the camera set to slave)

/Anders

http://homepage.mac.com/anders_peterson/ol...us_c5060wz.html

This (download the spreadsheet) is my C-5060 WZ "memory" so far.

/Anders

I dont know if things have changed with the 5050 since the 3040 but with the 3040 in P .. automatic you cant fire an external flash.

I personaly have many images with the olympus 3040 and have never needed or wanted to mess with the settings like sharpness etc .. although I have added red through the menu and also messed with white balance.

Sharpness and contrast etc can all be messed with afterwards. And if it that far off its just not a good enough image, and ya need to try again. As for exposure

I always went in Manual mode, but set the ss to 1/125 and the F stop to 5.6 to 8 depending and used it like a nikonos to begin with, simple ... but as you get to play you get to learn what effects you can create by moving the strobe and altering settings.

My input.

Giles

If you mean setting the flash to "slave" then no, this cannot be done in mode "P" with the 5060.

Using it like a Nikonos is a good description of how I use my 5060. "A" is my favourite mode, but with an external flash I use "M".

If you are going to do post-processing (any kind, incl. adjusting sharpness and contrast) the manual suggests setting the camera sharpness and contrast to lower values. They should be set to higher values if you want use the files as they come. I assume leaving theses setting at 0 means the images look ok and still have some potential for improvement.

/Anders

Shoot in RAW mode and then you don't have to worry about these things. All the settings you talk about are adjustable during post processing. You even get +-2 stops exposure compensation