Hello all, a question for the group: I shoot with a mirrorless camera (Olympus EM10ii), and thus have the ability to preview my shots in the EVF or on the screen as they will look when shot. I use a variety of custom shooting modes that I can save as presets (Olympus calls them “mysets”). In these mysets I can alter things like the level curve, contrast, saturation, etc… In fact, I can set it up so that my sooc jpegs have the same basic global edits I would do with my raw files for these things. I still often need to do local edits, however, which is why I still want to shoot in raw and edit in post. My question is this: If I’m shooting raw to edit in post, is it better to leave the live view set to pretty much what I want as a final product in terms of levels and saturation, etc., because that’s what I want it to look like eventually, or should I set up a very flat profile since the raw file will initially look flatter before editing? I can imagine the benefits of both approaches, so I am unsure which is the better one to do. Any advice will be appreciated!
You may want to experiment for yourself to see what sort of profile makes a more useful histogram. On my GR when I had the JPEG output set to as flat as possible, the histogram would indicate no clipping even when it actually had a channel clipped.
You can use your non-flat presets, it doesn’t matter, just take a moment to figure out when your raw file clips in relation to the live (JPEG) preview you see on the camera display.
@CarVac That is very interesting! My main worry was that by pushing the curve for the in camera jpeg rendition, I may be not getting the full dynamic range in the raw file. Interesting to hear that it’s possible to do the opposite with a “too flat” profile as well…
@Morgan_Hardwood That makes sense. My intuition is that the raw file will not be clipped if the jpeg isn’t, since the raw should have a larger dynamic range. But I have clearly been overthinking this, and I needed a “sanity check” from you guys to get the concepts straight in my mind. Thanks!