Olympus OM-D E-M1 review – White balance and colour
Image: The Colour Creator makes it easy to add a slight tint to monochrome images
It is rare to find a camera that has a truly bad auto white balance feature, and thankfully the Olympus OM-D E-M1 isn’t one of them. Colours are generally realistic and well rendered, and there are more than enough presets and options for tweaking and adjusting the default settings to get the exact colour balance required.
One very interesting new feature is the Colour Creator. This is a virtual colour wheel controlled via the two control dials. Turning one of the dials moves the marker around the Colour Creator, which changes the hue, while turning the other dial changes the saturation.
By using the two in combination, you can create different colour effects. For example, you can shift the hue round to a blue colour and completely desaturate the image to create a monochrome print with a blue tint, or give an image the look of a vintage print by adding a slight yellow tint to it.
Combined with the various different art filter effects and image styles, the contrast curve adjustments and the different highlight and shadow tone settings, there is a ridiculous number of ways to alter the look of your images in-camera – in fact, I think too many.
I always shoot raw+JPEG, so have the raw images to fall back on, but I found that with so much choice I was constantly trying out different effects. Thankfully, there is an image style bracketing option that will save the same image with a number of different image style effects applied, but this quickly eats away at your memory card and increases the time it takes to save each image. I suppose if you always shoot certain scenes in a particular way you can create presets of your chosen settings, but be warned: with the level of control on offer, it may take some time to decide upon your final settings.
