Shooting RAW with the Olympus Pen F

by | Aug 7, 2018

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Mary and I were a little late getting to the Chenango Car show last week and if I missed you, we apologize.

As I promised in my Chenango Show post, I brought along my Olympus Pen F Micro-four Thirds mirrorless camera because it’s a great camera for car shows because of its relatively small size. Lens was Oly’s 14-42mm f/2.5-5.6 II kit lens. A combination of this compact lens and the Pen F is a  easy-tocarry package and its 20+ megapixel files look great. The camera lacks an anti-aliasing filter too, so everything is sharp.

Since I originally tested the Olympus Pen F for the Mirrorless Photo Tips blog, I’ve wanted to own the camera but thought the price was just too high for my budget. I finally found one at an affordable price and you can read all about my successful search in my post “All Good Things… “ on my New Blog.

More and more these days I prefer to shoot using the RAW format but I had a problem with the .ORF files from the Pen F. Because I refuse to use and can’t afford Adobe’s Photoshop subscription service, shooting the Pen F left me with a bunch of .ORF Olympus Raw Format files that I couldn’t open with Photoshop CS6.

A little research showed that, if I had a camera serial number, I could download the free Olympus Viewer software that would let me open and save ORF files as either JPEG (why bother) or as 8 and 16-bit TIFF files.

While there is no compression with TIFF files I was concerned, maybe wrongly so, that the TIFF files might be lacking something. So I downloaded a copy of the free Adobe DNG Converter 10.4 and that did the trick, converting the .ORF files into the more portable DNG files that I could open using my old copy of Photoshop.

All of the images you see today were from .ORF files converted into DNG files and lightly (the Pen F files are pretty good SOOC) in Photoshop CS6.