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Tips on getting the most out of your Olympus C8080

It's possible to optimize the photo quality with this camera by adjusting the camera settings.

I’ve been an avid "prosumer" photographer for 25+ years, switching over to digital photography in the summer of 2001.  With much anticipation, I upgraded to the Olympus C8080 in March of 2005.  Pundits had claimed stellar photographs from the unit.

However, after using the default settings of P (program) mode and the HQ (High Quality) settings, I was rather disappointed in the crispness of the shots.  As I zoomed in to pixel view, I saw aberrations, as the information in any given pixel appeared to spread to its neighboring pixels as well.  Depth of field was bit of a disappointment as well.  Shooting scenes of fish and coral in an aquarium left me with a bunch of disappointing shots.

I put the camera in RAW mode and came up with some beautiful crisp shots, so I figured it wasn’t a defective lens or CCD, but rather sub-optimal default camera settings.  RAW photos took too much space and time to write onto the card, and importing them into my Photoshop 7.0 with Olympus’ plug in was too time consuming.

So I began playing around with various settings and determined the following produced much better photographs.  The sample photographs linked to were downsized to 1024 pixels max dimension to make for faster downloads.

• Switch to SHQ (Super High Quality) mode.  The compression ratio is much less lossy and it makes a huge difference in crispness.  Pixels don’t bleed over.
• Switch to A (aperture) priority mode.  Adjust speed to go for as high as f-stop (smaller aperture) as possible, preferably an 8, which is the smallest aperture the camera goes to.  Generally a person can hand hold a camera pretty still for a 1/60^th of a second.  Some with steadier hands can go to 1/30^th of a second.  When zoomed to max (5x), one might opt for 1/90^th of a second shutter speed or faster.
• Increase the saturation level to +2.  Makes for vivid beautiful colors which are more pleasing to the eye. {Picture > Saturation > +2} sample 1, sample 2
• Increase sharpness to +2.  Makes for crisper photos. {Picture > Sharpness > +2}
• Use an ISO of 100.  Automatic seems to default to 25, which is too low for generally shooting. {Camera > ISO > 100}.  Bump to higher ISO for shooting in dim light.
• Focus: set to P-AF for most shooting. {Camera > AF > P-AF > On}

Here are some other tips (and remember, you can always use Photoshop or other photo editing software to optimize the final photographs, as the samples have been) 

• Set the camera to recall the last setting when turned off and back on. The default is to restore the original manufacturer defaults when turned back on.  Given that the camera turns itself off when switching between modes, this is very inconvenient. {Tools > All reset > Off}
• Use M (manual) mode when using a non-Olympus external flash.  Use bounce flash off ceilings or walls to get great shots without red eye issues.  I have an 20-year old high powered zoom Vivitar 5600 flash which does wonders for illuminating shots and optimizing focal length. sample
• Use MF (manual focus) mode for distance shots in poor lighting.  The camera focuses well for fairly close shots in the dark (i.e. within resolving range of its red LED illuminator (way cool).  However, in default automatic focus, the camera has trouble focusing at a distance in the dark and besides the time consuming hunting for a focus point (which it has a hard time finding), shots will nearly always turn out blurry.
• For aerial firework shots, use A or M mode with an aperture of 6.3 or 8 and a shutter speed of 4 to 6 seconds depending on the frequency of the firework bursts.  sample 1, sample 2
• For sports action shots, shoot at 1/500^th of a second or faster shutter speed to capture action without the blur.  Freeze a wake-boarder in midair or capture a batter's point of impact with the bat.  sample 1, sample 2
• For macro shots (e.g. of flowers), use macro focus mode (MF with the flower) and as small an aperture as possible (i.e. 8) for maximum depth of field. sample 1, sample 2, sample 3
• For high contrast shots where you don’t have time to mess around with manual optimization, e.g. a bride and groom are shadowed under an awning with a bright sunshine lit crowd between you and the couple, temporarily point the camera to a dark object (like a tree) at about the same focus distance to get a better exposure reading, then holding the shutter button partway down, pan back to the bride and groom and complete the shot. Wedding sample

Post shot processing.

I automate processing of photos afterward in Photoshop using the following settings:

• Unsharp Mask: Amount: 100%, Radius: 5, Threshold: 3.  While this adds a little distortion at actual pixel view, overall the pictures look crisper when zoomed out or in full screen mode.
• Levels: Auto (though sometimes lowering brightness and increasing contrast may be better).

Obviously, you’ll want to adjust for your taste and preferences, so copy the files you want to test an automated process on into a separate folder.  Process those and if you like the results, copy over your originals.

If you are going to be creating a PowerPoint slide show of your photographs, I recommend resizing the photos to be imported to the standard screen size of 1024 x 768 first.  I recently shot a wedding and ended up with 177 shots.  Importing the photos at a .jpg size of around 2.5 MB, resulted in a 490 MB final project size and just about crashed most other computers that we tried to show it on (my is a high powered 1GB AMD Athlon 3200 PC RAID 0 that scoots through most tasks, but that is not what others have).  Copying the large photos to another folder, then automatedly resizing the copied photos to 1024 x 768 brought the final PowerPoint total to around 76.8 MB, a much more manageable size.

Microsoft Picture viewer:

If MS Windows Pictures and Fax Viewer is used to quickly peruse through photographs in a folder (Windows XP), expect it to display blurrier pictures than what you would normally expect.  This is because to speed up viewing, the Viewer displays less data.  Use the Viewer only for quick review of photos and to quickly eliminate shots that are blurry or poorly exposed (i.e. these cannot be adequately corrected in a photo editing program).

Be cautious about rotating pictures in the Viewer as well, because every save of a jpg file causes loss of data.  Ditto for RAW format.  Click for more info

If you want to manipulate photos without loss of data, convert to Tiff format, do all your editing including any rotations, then save in .jpg format.

Hope this is helpful.

Ed from Sharper Mind Centers.

P.S. If you know anyone with ADD/ADHD, dyslexia or struggling in school or with work, check out our home page.

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