One of the never ending issues with buying a new camera is that you need the latest photo editing software to be able to deal with the new RAW file structures of the camera.
This applies to all of the latest cameras although arguably there is less of an issue with those cameras which use the Adobe DNG RAW format.
The Olympus OM-D E-M5 is no exception to this, to process the RAW files in Adobe Lightroom, you need Lightroom v4.1 or later – at present there is only a release candidate available but it seems to work well.
Adobe Lightroom v4.x adds a few nice new features to Lightroom v3.x but it also means that by default your old presets no longer give the same results if they alter the following parameters
- Exposure
- Brightness
- Contrast
- Fill Light
- Highlight Recovery
- Black Clipping
- Clarity
- Tone Curve
That’s the BAD news, now the good news – you can have the presets working in Lightroom v4.x if in the Developer mode you scroll down to the Camera Calibration section and set Process to 2010.
Unfortunately, you will need to do that every time you want these old presets to work.
You have 2 options to manage this annoying problem:
- create a new preset with the process 2010 saved into the preset so Lightroom always reverts to 2010 format when using the preset
- try to re-create the appearance of the old preset in process 2012 then save as a new 2012 preset (this will of course no longer work in earlier versions of Lightroom)
The 1st option is simplest by far:
- open any image in Developer mode
- apply the preset
- set process to 2010
- press the + icon at the top of the list of presets to save your new preset – ensure all parameters used by the preset are ticked in the dialog box
- you can now delete the old preset
The downside to using process 2010 is that you will not be able to add further adjustments using process 2012 parameters, but you can still use new features such as the gradient tool.
The downside to converting them to process 2012 is that it will take a lot of trial and error to find new settings to match the old ones.
If you don’t upgrade, you can still use older versions to process your jpegs, but note, that by default, Lightroom will not import jpegs if it finds a similarly named RAW file, to enable this, you need to go to Edit:Preferences then under General there is a section “Import Options” – just tick the “Treat jpeg files next to RAW files as separate photos”
