First time out with OM-1

We spent the last half of June in Bonaire, and I used the OM-1 and Nauticam housing on 29 dives.  A gallery is linked below (I think so, anyway--the interface was a bit prickly). 

On almost all the images, workflow consisted of, in Photoshop, auto tone, followed by Topaz Sharpen, with the denoise set at 55.  Although I couldn't get Topaz to use any but the strongest profiles, many of them didn't need sharpening at all.  Most are full-size; if I cropped, I've put both the original and the cropped images for comparison purposes; I put the tight crops through Gigapixel to have workable file sizes.  I used a range of ISOs, and, to my perhaps-uncritical but satisfied eye, noise really wasn't a problem.

Although subjective, I found the focusing on the camera significantly improved over the E-m1ii I've used for several years.  There are a handful of images from a bonfire dive, which of course is a pretty challenging environment for the camera; I felt like it hunted less and found more.  The housing was, of course, familiar and flawless.  Most pictures were with two Inon Z330 strobes, and a focus light was used on some. 

https://rickmorgan.smugmug.com/Bonaire-June-2022/

Lovely collection of photos.  Thanks for your useful comments on the photo processing.

The images are pretty sharp but many highlights are clipped.

Not sure if this was due to the shooting settings or the adjustment but this seems to be a theme for the OM-1 it clips sooner

Thanks both.  Kraken, I'm glad you enjoyed the images!  Interceptor, I'm loath to blame the camera, when there's a much more obvious candidate.  I expect there are some un-mined highlights buried in the .orf files, but settings are of course a constant work in progress.  Thanks for taking the time to comment. 

Thanks for sharing. You’ve got lots of nice images.

I haven’t handled the Nauticam housing for the OM-1 yet but it looks like they’ve changed the thumb trigger for back button focus.  I absolutely love the ergonomics for that on the EM-1 mk II housing and wish for a similar thumb trigger on land!

I have recently started experimenting with the Topaz AI suite and so far am finding lots of positives and a few negatives.  DeNoise is amazing, always.  Sharpen can be great but also can do some weird things that look like fringes of chromatic aberration.  I have a few images that I cannot process well for that reason no matter the profile.  Some of your images seem to show that aspect too.  If anyone knows the secret sauce please share!

1 hour ago, rickmorgan said:

Thanks both.  Kraken, I'm glad you enjoyed the images!  Interceptor, I'm loath to blame the camera, when there's a much more obvious candidate.  I expect there are some un-mined highlights buried in the .orf files, but settings are of course a constant work in progress.  Thanks for taking the time to comment. 

Using auto is not a good idea on underwater shots...!

41 minutes ago, Interceptor121 said:

Using auto is not a good idea on underwater shots...!

I primarily use aperture preference--did you see some which were shot on auto?  Accidental if so.  However, I've not gotten accustomed to full manual camera settings.  I do confess to using iTTL more often than manual strobes (with an iTurtle trigger),  although I am doing some bullet-biting on the strobe settings.    

9 minutes ago, rickmorgan said:

I primarily use aperture preference--did you see some which were shot on auto?  Accidental if so.  However, I've not gotten accustomed to full manual camera settings.  I do confess to using iTTL more often than manual strobes (with an iTurtle trigger),  although I am doing some bullet-biting on the strobe settings.    

No auto tone in post processing

1 hour ago, troporobo said:

Thanks for sharing. You’ve got lots of nice images.

I haven’t handled the Nauticam housing for the OM-1 yet but it looks like they’ve changed the thumb trigger for back button focus.  I absolutely love the ergonomics for that on the EM-1 mk II housing and wish for a similar thumb trigger on land! 

I have recently started experimenting with the Topaz AI suite and so far am finding lots of positives and a few negatives.  DeNoise is amazing, always.  Sharpen can be great but also can do some weird things that look like fringes of chromatic aberration.  I have a few images that I cannot process well for that reason no matter the profile.  Some of your images seem to show that aspect too.  If anyone knows the secret sauce please share!

Thank you, Troporobo. 

The thumb trigger is the same.  Here are the two housings together.  I like that the OM1 body has a "focus on" button by default, but to your point, it is not as well-located as the Nauticam lever.  Also having the ISO button by the right thumb without button-programming is nice. 

My main beef with Topaz Sharpen is that only the "very" (blurry, oof, etc) are available.  Topaz patches the software so regularly that I assume this will come.  And I agree that some gross artifacts come into play on some of these images.  I didn't use Topaz (or any) sharpening because I figured folks evaluating a switch to the OM1 might want to see pictures without it.  I can make pictures available as-shot if anyone is interested, of course. 

25 minutes ago, Interceptor121 said:

No auto tone in post processing

Ahh, that.  Agreed.  I rarely use it, but wanted to do a consistent workflow across the images for evaluation purposes.