#OLYMPUS MASTER 2 DOWN MANUAL#
#OLYMPUS MASTER 2 DOWN SKIN#

Outdoors, the Olympus E-PL2 performed well, with good color and good exposure in the outdoor Far-field House shot. Very good exposure accuracy in our Far-field House shot, but our 'Sunlit' Portrait shot required slightly higher than average exposure compensation. Natural looking colors overall, with good use of available dynamic range. (Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.) The Olympus E-PL2 required an average amount of positive exposure compensation here, at +0.3 EV. The 2,600 Kelvin setting was quite cool with a blue-green tint.

#OLYMPUS MASTER 2 DOWN MANUAL#

Results with the Incandescent setting were quite good and just a touch warmer than the Manual setting, which was the most accurate. Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance was very warm with the Auto white balance setting. Very warm cast with Auto White Balance, but good color with the Incandescent and Manual settings. Changes to each picture mode are saved separately, and you can define your own Custom setting as well. You can tweak contrast, saturation, gradation and other parameters (depending on the mode). The Olympus E-PL2 offers twelve preset 'Picture modes', including six 'Art Filters'. (The cyan to blue shift is very common among the digital cameras we test we think it's a deliberate choice by camera engineers to produce better-looking sky colors.) Overall hue accuracy was very good with a Delta-C color error of only 4.57, which is better than average. The Olympus E-PL2 did push cyan toward blue and red toward orange, but shifts were relatively minor to moderate.

#OLYMPUS MASTER 2 DOWN SKIN#

Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these 'memory colors' to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc. Here, the Olympus E-PL2 did well, producing natural-looking skin tones, just slightly on the pinkish side. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. You can always boost saturation, or select a different picture mode if the default color is too dull for your tastes. Default saturation is only 97.37% (2.63% undersaturated), which is still quite accurate, but somewhat muted overall. The Olympus E-PL2 pushes reds and dark brown a bit, but undersaturates most other colors. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center. Hue changes as you travel around the center. More saturated colors are located toward the periphery of the graph.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. Good color and very good hue accuracy, though most colors are slightly undersaturated.

Olympus master 2 down