glenbarrington

Olympus optics are very good. Their kit lenses are the best kit lenses you'll find anywhere. (except for the Panasonic and Leica 4/3s cameras which use the Leica lenses) And their lens line is excellent although somewhat. Also don't forget, the 4/3s cameras (Olympus, Panasonic, & Leica) are the ONLY DSLRs that can use Leica lenses.

 

Most of my photos are taken with the Oly E500, go to my portfolio and take a look. (I'm finally getting good enough to where I feel comfortable saying that!)

I'm using a Canon i900D and I simply could NOT get a decent print out of Lightroom when I was consistently getting perfect color out of PSE3, PSE5 and ACDSee fotoSlate. I had been using Canon Ink and paper and the driver that came with the printer on my XP system.

 

Though I had no reason to suspect my driver since it was performing well with other printing programs, out of desperation, I checked the Canon site to see if my driver was up to date. I was a generation old,they had a driver specifically for Win XP. So I installed the new driver and that appeared to make all the advice I had been recieving from others to actually work. So make sure your printer driver is current. (You can download drivers from the support/download page of your printer manufacturers web site)

 

In LR, Do not use 'managed by printer'. I am manually setting the profile - PR1 for Canon Photo Paper Glossy Plus with perceptual rendering intent. (I tried relative but preferred perceptual)

 

In the printer control program, The printer properties are set to high print quality with manual color adjustment. On the manual color adjustment screen, color balance area, magenta is at -20 and intensity is -12 (I was having trouble with consistently too much magenta and too dark), other sliders are in the middle(i.e. set to zero). I have Enable ICM checked. (I treid it without 'Enable ICM', and results were closer with than without.)

 

Now, this information is for an older Canon printer and Lightroom V1.0. I have yet to test this on the just released LR V1.1

Yes, I too find the combination of LR and PSE5 to be an ideal combination for me. I hardly ever use PSE anymore but I realize I need SOME sort of selective editing on occasion.

 

What I'd like to see is for Adobe to take the PSE editor and modify it to work as an optional add-on module for Lightroom, so I wouldn't need to export the photo to PSE. Instead, it would be just another module.

 

Then my life would be complete!

Make sure you read the README file, big changes important stuff.

It has never occurred to me to import the cards each into a separate folder. What does that do for you?

I use a new Sunpack 383 directly on the E500, works great. I shot a wedding last week with it and only used two sets of batteries. (About 375 shots using the flash as either fill or as main lighting.) About $80 USD new. I really like it a lot and if I change camera brands, I can use it with the new camera.

 

Although, one advantage of the Olympus FL-50 that is causing me to consider it in spite of the cost, is that the FL-50 comes with a focus assist light (as you probably know by now, the E500 lacks this).

 

This was a garden wedding and the reception tent was poorly lit. And as it got darker and darker, the auto focus became less and less reliable. Finally I was forced to go to manual focus and guess since there are no distance markings on many modern lenses. It worked out OK, but that focus assist light sure would have come in handy!

 

I also use older flash units with a Wein SafeSynch. The SafeSynch is about $50 USD, but worth it since it gives you the freedom to use just about any old flash on your camera.

 

The older technology auto-thyristor flash units like the Sunpack and Vivitar offer a LOT of power and features for the money, and if you are on a budget, I would recommend getting one. Just be aware that you will lose some features by not buying a dedicated flash unit.

At my neice's garden wedding, there were four bridesmaids, three of the

blondest white girls you ever saw, and one African-American girl with a

beautiful rich medium brown skin tone. My neice is also quite blond (and drop-

dead gorgeous, my side of the family, no doubt).

 

The problem was it was VERY hot that day in the garden and the girls were quite

flushed from the heat. So the blond girls grew rather red while it didn't show

so much on the black girl.

 

My problem comes from PP, if I make the white girls look 'right' (and not

so 'RED'), the young black girl has an unhealthy yellow cast. If I make the

black girl look 'right', the white girls look like tall willowy beets.

 

How do you guys resolve this issue? do I make everyone look a little 'off'? I'm

using Lightroom, if that makes a difference. I'm reluctant to go into an editor

and make selective color corrections, but I don't see any alternative. Is there

something I could have done at shooting time to minimize this issue?

 

FYI, I'm cross posting in FourThirdsForum.com

Of course PSE5 has curves. It also has layers, levels, healing brush, cloning, AND it uses ACR. So a PSE user who wants to explore the use of RAW has free access to a quality raw converter.

IS NR good or bad? Depends on what you are going for. NR works by blurring the image just a bit, so NR that is too strong will cause you to lose detail in a way that may be unacceptable. But in a noisy image, the noise can get in the way and distract the viewer.

 

Finding the balance is the key and that is mostly a personal taste thing. Sometimes in some photos, you can never find an acceptable balance.

I think you are wishing that 4/3s cameras could behave like an APS camera. They each have different strengths and weaknesses. If you need APS performance, you probably ought to buy an APS camera.

To Eric A,

 

Well to be fair, it's like a brick sitting on top of a small ball!

I have been able to successfully delete folders from Lightroom and they disappear completely from ACDSee Pro. Not sure what you are doing wrong there.

 

I have no experience with your other software products aside from an Imatch trial a couple of years ago. I think you would get better answers from the Adobe User to User forums, a lot of really smart people hang out there.

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/index.html

Not that I know of.

I've re examined ACDSee Pro 2 beta and I don't see how to do what you ask. Sorry.

It's doing it in batch that may prove difficult. The free beta of ACDSee Pro V2.0 will work until the End of September, that'll likely do it. You can get it here: http://www.acdseepro.com/

I wouldn't have a Photoshop maagazine, as such. I much prefer general purpose photo magazines. 'Lenswork' and the Canadian magazine 'PhotoLife' are my two current favorites.

John & Barry

 

One of the reasons to use Lightroom is to eliminate destructive editing. So when you tell LR to edit in PS, what occurs is that either a 16 bit Tiff or PSD (your choice in Preferences) is created, and sent to Photoshop. THIS is the image that you edit in Photoshop, then when you save that image, it is imported and catalogued as a new image. So you have the original and the edited version in LR. It was designed to work this way and it is the only way for Lightroom to know about any chnges you make to that new photo.

 

You can work around this by opening the file directly in Photoshop or other graphics program, but since LR didn't do any set up and prep, it doesn't know about any changes to the image. So LR will continue to show you the last tumbnail IT created. AND it will attempt to bring it back to the state that the last set of editing instructions it knows about in its database.

 

If you don't like having non destructive editing and being allowed to only edit copies of photos in Photoshop, then you should stop using Lightroom. You are trying to force it to do things it was designed to avoid at all costs.

You are going to find vindictive morons in any cross section of society! And that WILL happen from time to time.

 

But if you are afriad of having your ego bruised, especially from some dope looking for 'revenge', then you probably ought not to post any photos. But I urge you to post anyway and risk that ego bruising, you will be a better photographer for it!

 

The whole point of photography is communictions. And the whole point of posting is to facilitate that communication. Sometimes it goes awry and a shouting match ensues. Just like in the rest of life.

 

But isolating yourself is hardly the answer! You NEED that interaction (even the bad!) You need to know what people are pulling from your photos (even from the idiots). You need to know not only what you THINK you are saying, but you need to know what OTHERS think you are saying!

 

There is one incredibly mean spirited series of posts on a photo in my portfolio, which I have left in. I refuse to pull the photo because I LIKE it. I leave it up to the people who follow behind the woman who posted to decide who is right, me or her.

 

Remember, it's only words, they can't kill you. And you might actually learn something from it.

Also, FYI the Sunpack 383 is voltage compatible as well. I use it with no voltage regulator on my E510 no problems so far!

 

I read somewhere(Sorry, don't remember where, so I can't document this) that Olympus and Nikon require a maximum of 12 volts not 6 like Canon; making modern third party flashes much more viable for these brands than Canon.

Jacob, thanks for the detailed answer. Life is full of trade-offs, isn't it? And the E410 is no different!

I think what you are getting is image noise from the tiny amount of electricity that is required to course thru the sensor. In a supersensitive high iso mode, the gain is turned up so that in the dark areas of the photo just that amount of ambient electircity is enough to trigger the pixel sensors.

 

You are attempting the very thing the E500 just doesn't do very well, that is extreme low light stuff.

 

What I would do, is run it through an anti-noise filter and see if that helps. PS has a basic one, but You'd do better with noise ninja or Noiseware. Noiseware has (or at least had, not sure, it's been a while since I checked) a free version that they call the 'Community' version. It only works on jpgs, so you should do any of your raw stuff first before converting to jpg. But that may help quite a bit.

Adobe reader V6 isn't THAT old, I should think it whould run on any flavor of XP. It might choke on, say, Win98. I wonder if you don't have something else going on? What OS are you using? how fast is the chip?

 

Try downloading the 30 day free trials of some of them.

HMMM! I interpreted that E410 review to mean that IQ had essentially caught up with the competition!

What do you mean by Adobe programs don't run on your machine? If you mean Lightroom, I would understand, since it requires a moderately powerful computer with over 1 gig of ram.

 

However, if Photoshop Elements doesn't run well on an older machine with, say 512 meg of RAM, then your computer is probably too old to use almost any modern product.

I'm pretty sure some pros DO use PSE, it would seem to me that when coupled with Lightroom, PSE would work rather well (and be pretty cost effective) for many wedding photographers.

 

However those pros who need create pre press output will need to use CS2 or CS3. AND there are a lot of tools in those apps that allow for much more control than what is found in PSE.

 

There's nothing wrong in using a lower priced product until you demonstrate a continuing need for a more expensive one.