#Olympus Viewer Studio upgrade
#Olympus Viewer Studio pro

You're better off selecting an application that can work with files from a wide range of cameras and which offers more processing flexibility than an application like Olympus Viewer does. I wouldn't recommend an application which is dedicated to the files of only one camera simply because of that fact. Olympus Viewer is slow as others have said, and it also doesn't have the same range of editing options as 3rd party applications like Lightroom, DxO's application, Capture One, and many other applications. If you ever find yourself in a position where you buy a camera body from another manufacturer, say a Panasonic m43 body, you're going to have to process files from that camera in another application. The big problem with Olympus Viewer is that it can only process Olympus RAW files and possibly JPEGs from other cameras (never tried that). Some applications including Lightroom let you modify the defaults with your own preferred default setting, Olympus Viewer uses the JPEG settings from your camera as the default (it's the only application with an editing program which can apply the camera settings you enter in your Olympus camera's menus), and I don't know what Silkypix does. It doesn't matter what RAW conversion application you choose to use, it will have its own default settings for the image you get shown on import.

I really want to like SP, but simply can't. Occasionally I might run them through LR just to very very lightly tweak shadows or highlights, maybe WB, because I'm resizing as well, but that's it. Lovely detailed colorful jpegs, straight out of the camera, with zero work. I've actually gone to shooting jpegs, in vibrant setting, +1 on contrast, saturation, minus 5 on NR, sharpening on standard, and using iDynamic. Which is a bit strange, as I can quite easily match Canons DPP output with my Canon bodies. I still can't get color that I consistently like though. Can pull much more detail out of the highlights than SP. I have Lightroom 4, and used Abobes DNG converter with my GX8, and find that much better. Just can't get something that I consistently like. I also don't really like the color reproduction. I use a relatively fast quad core i7 laptop, with 8 gig of ram, and it's slow. Well, not that I could find, or figure out.

Much like Canons DPP does with their own bodies. Someone said that it recognizes your camera raw picture style settings that you set in the camera menus on import. On one of their Panasonic only discounted promotions.

#Olympus Viewer Studio pro

I tried the latest Silkypix pro version about 4 or so months back. The problem with Lightroom is that the default RAW import basically never satisfied me and I don't want to have to go through and create a bunch of presets when Olympus and Panasonic have already done so.

So, do Olympus Viewer and Silkypix behave this way? Are they decent software? Or is this idea nuts? If so, could I not use Olympus Viewer or Silkypix instead of fussing around with RAW+jpeg? It'd handle my postprocessing needs by default in most cases and, for those files where I really wanted to postprocess, I could use Lightroom. Then, I thought to myself, 'Hey, do Olympus Viewer and Silkypix process RAW files and produce jpegs that are identical to their default SOOC jpegs?' And then I though, 'And hey, will Olympus Viewer and Silkypix also by default use any in-camera jpeg choices I make? (Like black and white modes.)' I had been planning to shoot RAW+jpeg, use the jpegs by default, and then post-process RAW files where either I found the jpeg unsatisfying or felt it was a really special picture meriting extra work. (Well, they are better than G5 jpegs, which is why I want to upgrade.) I appreciate post-processing, but the reality is that I don't end up producing photos that look vastly better than straight-out-of-camera jpegs.

#Olympus Viewer Studio upgrade

One of the key reasons I want to upgrade is that I'm tired of fiddling around with post-processing. So, I'm getting quite close to getting a new camera body, almost certainly either a GX85 or E-M10 ii.