The following series of images were taken at ISO 3200:
1. JPEG, Noise Filter = Standard
2. JPEG, Noise Filter = Standard
3. JPEG, Noise Filter = Off
4. RAW, via Adobe Camera Raw
5. RAW with Photoshop Reduce Noise filter
6. RAW with Photoshop Reduce Noise filter, resized to 1200 x 900
The first image shows us the well exposed scene which was shot at ISO 3200. Now it’s very important to get your exposure right when working at ISO 3200, because the camera has much less dynamic range at this sensitivity. Using center-weighted metering, I had to use +1 1/3 EV exposure compensation. If I had just let the camera do its thing and underexpose the image, and tried to correct the underexposure in post processing, I would essentially be working with an image that was push processed to ISO 8000, so the results wouldn’t be as good as we see with the well exposed image.
The second image shows us a 100% crop of the JPEG saved with the Noise Filter set to Standard. This is the setting I recommend for the Noise Filter (although I admit that I haven’t really experimented much with Low or High).
In the third image, the Noise Filter was set to Off. The result is absolutely horrible! What has happened here is that the JPEG processing engine has applied sharpening to the noise and made the noise look horrible. This happened even though I had in-camera sharpening set to -2, the lowest value. This is impossible to fix in post processing. The image has been ruined (although, admittedly, a lot of detail has been preserved). The E-620 JPEGs have this problem no matter what ISO you use. Even at ISO 200, if you have the Noise Filter set to Off, the noise is sharpened and looks ugly. Don’t set the E-620 Noise Filter to Off!
The fourth image was developed using Adobe Camera Raw (the ORF file was first converted to DNG because I don’t have the latest version of Photoshop). There is a lot more chroma noise than in the JPEG in which the Noise Filter was set to “Off.” Obviously, even when turned “Off,” the Noise Filter is still really on with respect to chroma noise.
I also looked at the ORF file in Olympus Master and discovered that Olympus Master did the same lousy sharpening as the in-camera JPEG image. As far as I can tell, Olympus Master does nothing but give you the exact same JPEGs you would get straight from the camera, so what's the point of it? A big thumbs down for Olympus Master. It’s not worth bothering with RAW files if Olympus Master is all that you have.
The fifth image, in my opinion, is the best result. I took the raw image, and used the Reduce Noise filter in Photoshop. There is a good compromise between noise and resolution. You could get even better results (not a whole lot better, but better nevertheless) if you used a dedicated noise reduction program or Photoshop plug-in such as Neat Image.
Finally, to create the sixth image, I took the RAW file that was processed in Photoshop and had the Reduce Noise filter applied to it, then resized it to 1200 x 900, and took a crop from the 1200 x 900 image. Now what’s the point of that you ask? Well on my monitor, a 1200 x 900 image is approximately 12.5 x 9.5 inches, so I figure this is a pretty good approximation of what would happen if tried to make an 8 x 10” print, and it’s also pretty much the largest size you would ever use for publishing an image on the web.
In the sixth image, the noise is barely noticeable. Thus my conclusion is that a well-exposed ISO 3200 image from the E-620 is perfectly usable for 8 x 10” print purposes or web viewing if you shoot RAW. But my other conclusion is that Olympus has done a really bad job with its in-camera JPEG engine, because I like the unfiltered result from Adobe Camera Raw better than any of the poorly processed in-camera JPEGs.
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