Here I show the default raw conversion for Photoshop CS4 and CS5 as well as from Olympus Viewer. I then show the RAW editor enhanced conversions for these three. The CS5 versions are courtesy of George Sinesios (GSI International). The RAW editors of CS4 and CS5 are much more flexible than that of Viewer, but George said that all he did in CS5 was to lower the black levels a bit to remove the shadow blocking. In CS4 I also did that as well as doing some highlight recovery and a bit of brightness control. In Viewer I used the shading compensation in the advanced editing.

I also show comparisons of the three Default edits and of the three enhanced edits. These comparisons are a screen capture made in ACDSee (v2.5). I'm putting all these shots in full size so that anyone who wants to download one to fiddle with is welcome to do so. I'll leave the full size originals for 10 days or so them remove them so save me a bunch of Pbase space.

My conclusion is that Viewer is not as bad an editor as everyone seems to think. It does offer very little flexibility. CS5 seems a real improvement over CS4 in the conversion engine to produce JPEG from ORF. With very little enhancement the shadows become unblocked and the details in the highlights are superior. The sizes of the files are interesting. Viewer is about 4.7Mb and CS4 produces 6.2Mb while CS5's JPEG is 7.5Mb. All were saved at the highest possible in the Editor.