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I have an Olympus E-PL2 and am taking photos in raw. I have the codec downloaded from Olympus, so I can view the photo with Picasa in Windows, and it looks fine but a few seconds after loading the image, it goes and does something in which it looks like it desaturates the whole photo. What is going on? I know there are many posts asking 'what is a good raw viewer' but I'm looking more for a solution for Picasa if possible since I use it for all my photo management.

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Duplicate of photo.stackexchange.com/questions/3668/… – Jukka Suomela Jan 7 '12 at 21:20
I agree that this is effectively a duplicate (because the same thing happens in other software), but that one is specific to Lightroom and this one to Picassa. – mattdm Jan 8 '12 at 3:28
indeed, i found it difficult to describe the 'problem' and didn't see a suggested match as I was posting my ? – pyInTheSky Jan 8 '12 at 4:08
1  
another similar question – nuc Jan 10 '12 at 18:31

3 Answers

up vote 21 down vote accepted

Sorry but you are confused. Picasa first shows you the JPEG preview that is embedded in RAW files.

It then loads the RAW data and lets it be converted by the codec. What you see then is the RAW file with default convertion.

In order to get something good from a RAW file, you have to work at it. IIRC there are questions here regarding matching the JPEG conversion and about why RAW files do not look so good by default.

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P.S.: +1 to this answer, but I don't think being confused is anything anyone has to be sorry about. :) – mattdm Jan 7 '12 at 21:45
I'll accept your answer, but it's odd that you say it shows me the jpg and then the raw. I took the advice of another questioner and installed faststone image viewer, and the raw preview looks great, nothing at all like the picasa preview. Is it actually showing me a jpg preview and not the raw? – pyInTheSky Jan 8 '12 at 3:57
1  
Yes, the image shown is the embedded JPEG which is not ambiguous to render. The desaturation happens because colors and tones of RAW can be interpreted differently. – Zak Jan 10 '12 at 1:40
up vote 5 down vote

Most RAW photos include a JPEG thumbnail (which is what you'll see initially); Then Picasa runs the RAW decoding (with different parameters to your camera), giving you your desaturated image.

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up vote 1 down vote

Picasa does not use the camera's settings for conversion of the RAW but instead it's own algorithm. It is one of the worst converters out there, but you get what you pay for.

I started using Irfanview and have been quite happy with it. Picasa is where I do my organization.

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