Olympus Viewer 2 NEW Software

[digitalzed]

Olympus announced what seems to be a replacement for the Master software program called Viewer 2. It's a free download (you do need to enter your cameras serial number) and it's available for Windows and Mac. It does run faster than Master did on my MacBook Pro, and I tried the ib software that came with my E-PL1 on my Windows machine and Viewer 2 is far superior. If you want to try it, you can find it here:

OLYMPUS Viewer 2 Download

[Robert Watcher]

I just downloaded it myself and was quite impressed. I'm not going into detail or providing a review - but here are 2 or 3 observations on first use:

Olympus Viewer 2 allows me to mark my favorite images with a color designation quickly - as I do in Lightroom or Bridge when editing down my weddings or portraits to the final selection. Easy to use and fairly complete set of basic editing features - and the Noise Reduction slider is simple. Oh yes - and being able to add the Art Filters after the fact is a really nice bonus if those effects are desirable.

I really like that it has Perspective Correction - which is something that I accomplish in Photoshop through the Lens Correction Filter. Very useful for tilted images - - - but also when shooting groups with a wide angle lens in tighter spaces and people standing near the edges are distorted.

Also nice to have a basic Movie function built in - to support all of the new cameras like the Pens that are providing that ability. It was really slow loading a folder of about 8 GB of video into the Lightbox from my external USB drive where I store them - and you can't do anything else until everything is loaded (like if you change your mind and want to go to a different folder). But once loaded, movies could be accessed and played with no problems. Even a few basic editing features like fade in/out, cut and merge frames - plus the ability to grab a single frame from the movie.

And can't forget that it will handle Olympus RAW images and does a really nice job of processing them.

It certainly is a valuable and free application for any who do not need the heavy learning curve of the Adobe products or who have not invested in them. And maybe for someone like me who uses both a PC for my workstation and a Mac for my laptop - where 2 different licences would be required for both Lightroom and Photoshop to have them on both computer systems - - - it will be nice having this software to manage and edit photos on the computer that doesn't have those licensed programs on it. Did I say that right?

[Raist3d]

This is basically Olympus Studio without the live tethering feature for free.