Olympus E-M5 JPEG vs RAW
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To compare real-life performance between RAW and JPEG files on the Olympus OM-D E-M5, I shot this scene in the camera's RAW+JPEG mode.
The sensitivity was set to 200 ISO and the aperture to f5.6.
The JPEG was processed using the in-camera defaults, while the RAW file was processed using the Olympus Viewer 2 (Version1.31) application supplied with the camera. You can see results processed with Adobe Camera RAW in Gordon's E-M5 vs GX1 noise results page.
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The first column of crops below are the same ones from the outdoor real life test results from the previous page and show the in-camera processed JPEG. The second column was produced from the RAW file processed in Olympus Viewer 2 using the default 'As shot' settings. It's not something you can always take for granted, but the default RAW processing has produced very similar results to the in-camera processing.
For the third column of crops I've edited the default settings to remove the fringing in the third crop and increase the sharpness and contrast. The actual settings used were Chromatic aberration R/C -40, Sharpness +1 and Contrast +1. Both of the RAW files were saved as JPEGs using the high quality setting which produced a 7.1MB file - slightly smaller then the JPEG from the camera.
While the edge detail in these crops is sharper, there's a lot more noise visible and no real increase in the amount of fine image detail. With a little more experimentation you could probably get an improved result with less noise, but I think you'll have to work at it to get a result that improves on the in-camera JPEGs. Olympus bodies have always enjoyed excellent in-camera JPEG processing, a tradition the E-M5 continues.
Now let's see how the cameras compare at higher sensitivities in my Olympus E-M5 noise results. | 
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