Olympus Viewer is the latest picture management, editing and RAW conversion software from Olympus. With sophisticated features that will suit the photography enthusiast, this software is also easy enough for use by beginners, and contains an easy-to-follow help file.
 

Viewer assists you to easily sort, select, compare and file your images into different folders or directories on your hard drive. Its picture editor helps you enhance pictures with industry standard tools like picture tone adjustment, sharpening (unsharp masking), and black and white conversions. With pictures captured by PEN and SLR cameras, it is even able to automatically correct lens geometric distortions, vignetting and even remapping fisheye lens shots to become normal linear pictures. Finally, Viewer is a powerful raw picture converter with automated batch processing capability for users of Olympus PEN, SLR and Creator series compact cameras.

The best thing about Olympus Viewer is that it is completely free of charge for Olympus camera owners.

Download Olympus Viewer from here [DOWNLOAD LINK] 

Whilst you can immediately use Viewer right away after installing it, it's worthwhile spending a few minutes to set it up for optimum usability.

If your computer uses a dual-core or multi-core CPU and has more than 1 GB of computer memory, you can significantly speed up Viewer’s operations by activating multi-core support. The benefit of letting Viewer use more than one processor core is especially evident in RAW image processing. (Please check with your computer's manufacturer about the specifications of its CPU. If your computer's CPU does not utilise a multi-core processor, leave this setting at the default Standard setting)

From the top menu, select TOOLS > OPTIONS > ADVANCED SETTINGS and select the multi-processor option as shown.

Customising the Toolbar

Viewer's toolbar makes using its various powerful features easy. It’s a good idea to customise the toolbar to further enhance its ease of use. To do so, point your mouse arrow to any empty part of the toolbar and right-click. This will bring up an options menu; select Customise Toolbar.

On bigger computer screens, setting the toolbar icon sizes to "Large" will make using its functions much easier. Make your most frequently used functions visible by adding them to the "current toolbar buttons" box on the right; you can also hide the ones you don't use.

Colour Management

If you have calibrated and profiled your monitor (using optional third party software and hardware), activating Colour Management allows you to see colours and picture tones accurately (Leave this turned off if you don't use monitor calibration). Olympus Viewer is a fully ICC aware application.

With your camera connected via USB to the computer, transferring images from the memory card to your computer's harddisk drive is extremely easy using Viewer’s import picture feature.

With the camera already connected to the computer and switched on, select the image transfer function from FILE > Transfer Images > Transfer Images From Camera. If you are using a memory card reader instead of a camera, select the Specified Location option instead and choose the drive letter that represents the memory card on your computer.
               

The next screen shows the transfer picture window. With the Transfer Destination options on the right, create a destination for the pictures you're about to transfer by using the Create New Folder option.


 


With the destination folder targetted, you're set to transfer.




Press the arrow button in between the two boxes and you're done.

It's worth your time to explore the picture transfer window further as it contains many options that will make working with your imported photos easier. For instance if you'd like the pictures to be automatically placed into folders by their captured dates, activate the "Create Subfolder with Shooting Date" option. Instead of using the default picture filenames, you can label each imported picture automatically by selecting the "Change Name" option and then determine the name convention you prefer.
 
Once you have imported the pictures from your camera, you can then proceed to select, sort and edit them further.





In Part 2, we'll look at how you can use Viewer to sort, and edit the images you have imported from your camera.