Olympus Viewer 3 Basic Post-Processing Workshop

Tomorrow, I will be conducting my first ever post-processing workshop for Olympus RAW files using specifically the Olympus Viewer 3 software. I am both extremely excited and nervous at the same time, as I have not done this before, and I am showing my own RAW images in the live demonstration on how I achieve the "Robin Wong" look for the first time to an audience.

Selected RAW images for the Post-Processing workshop demonstration


I acknowledge the Olympus Viewer 3 is not the most user friendly software and it is so sluggish that it makes any grown man cry after using this software just for a little while. I would not recommend Olympus Viewer 3 for serious professional use, as it is resource hungry and it is just too slow for anything productive, especially dealing with a huge batch of images (wedding/event or sports shooters). I am not sure why Olympus could not make it any more efficient, it is surely just some programming optimization and even the fastest computer now will struggle with the use of Olympus Viewer 3, doing something so basic such as white balance tweaking.

So why the post-processing workshop with Olympus Viewer 3? The software ihas basically the same JPEG engine built into Olympus cameras, the Truepic engine, which renders the magical Olympus colors which I have worked with all these years, producing beautiful, life like colors and pleasing skin tones. Furthermore, having fully automated lens technical flaw controls (CA, distortion, etc), sharpness and details optimization as well as excellent built in noise reduction for high ISO images, I have not really found any other software that can get so much out of Olympus RAW files. The magic sauce that everyone is asking me all these years, how to achieve the kind of look in my images? The answer has always been openly obvious, I did most of my post-processing work with Olympus RAW files on Olympus Viewer 3.

If only we can somehow get Olympus to significantly improve the Viewer 3's operational speed and performance, at least good enough for commercial use.... One can only dream.


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