Colour labels

As most photo buffs who have returned from an extended holiday can attest, one of the big challenges of digital photography is to sort through and file away the hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures that you've happily snapped. Olympus Viewer has useful features to help you select, sort and manage your images. The easiest one to use is the colour label. 
 

A quick look at each picture thumbnail shows three colour label options that can be selected.


 

If, for example, you decide that all keepers should be labelled red, just click on the red label below each picture you wish to be part of this select group.
 

TIP: To label a whole bunch of pictures quickly, use CTRL-A on your keyboard (Command-A in Mac OSX) to select all thumbnails in a folder, and then, with the CTRL key held down, mouse left-click to deselect the pictures you wish to eliminate from the group. With all the pictures you wish to label highlighted, simply apply the desired colour label to this group of pictures by activating the colour label any one highlighted image. 
 

Now, to view just the keepers, select the view red label icon at the bottom of the screen.



 
 

If you have sorted the images in the folder by using more than one colour label, switch between viewing each colour group by clicking on the colour label you wish to see.

Comparing pictures

The Lightbox comparison function is useful to compare similar images for sharpness or focus differences. Just click on the Lightbox icon on the toolbar to bring up the split panes.



Drag and drop the pictures you wish to compare into either pane of the comparison window.

 



You can have more than two comparison panes by using the pane option (blue circle above). The tools (circled in yellow) assist you in comparing the two images - e.g., magnify, grab and move, rotate. Notice that the two images are now 'linked' as you magnify them. The grabber handtool allows you to move the pictures around in unison to compare the same or similar sections.

To unlink the images say for the purpose of enabling better alignment of sections to compare, just click the link button (red circle), and use the handtool to reposition a picture and click to link up again.
 

If you need to resize a bunch of pictures quickly, do this:

SELECT ALL the images within the folder (Ctrl-A or use the mouse) then right-click like so:




The resize dialog box appears which allows you to adjust the dimensions of the selected images in a batch.



 

 

Every picture captured by a digital camera contains 'meta-information' that can be useful for educational purposes. Click the 'Properties' button on the toolbar.

 

Apart from helping you know when a picture was taken (assuming the date and time were set up correctly on the camera in the first place) image meta-data known as EXIF information tells you useful picture taking information such as shutter speed, lens aperture and whether flash was used.
 

 


 

The picture editor in Viewer enables you to fine-tune your picture further. Whilst Viewer is not designed as a replacement for full-fledge picture editors like Adobe Photoshop, its editing functions  enables the quick and easy adjustment of some of the most essential picture properties like tonal curves, sharpness (with a sophisticated unsharp mask function) and colour balance, noise reduction and colour-to-black-and-white conversions. With images captured by Olympus SLR and PEN cameras, you can use unique functions such as automatic lens distortion adjustment, fisheye de-fishing and automatic vignetting removal.

Explore the editing capabilities of Viewer by selecting the Editor function icon on the toolbar.

 

From time to time, Olympus provides updates to Olympus Viewer. Select the Update function in the pulldown menu to check for updates. You’d need a live internet connection to access the Olympus server to check for, and to download updates.