OMD EM5 and ACR in Photoshop CS5

If ACR is opening E-M5 RAW files then it is using an E-M5 camera profile.

Go to the Camera Calibration pane and click on the Profile drop menu. It is probably displaying "Adobe Standard" and when you click on it you should get a list which includes Camera Muted, Camera Natural, Camera Vivid, and Camera Portrait. Those are all slightly different profiles for an E-M5. The profile list doesn't identify the camera, it just lists the profiles available for the camera. The camera is identified in the metadata which you can see in the Library module if you scroll down the right side a bit. If there are no profiles for your camera, ACR and Lightroom won't open RAW files from cameras.

Yes, it's not very obvious that they are E-M5 profiles but don't worry, they actually are.

 

PS—You'll probably think about lens profiles at some stage also. ACR won't list any for native micro four thirds lenses. The reason for that is that the profile is embedded in the metadata the camera includes in the image file it creates and that profile is then applied automatically by ACR/Lightroom when it opens the image. The lens profile isn't listed simply because you don't get to choose it, it just gets applied.

It is possible to create and instal other lens profiles and I understand that you can even download some from Adobe. If you install additional lens profiles then you will see those profiles displayed in the lens profile list but unless you actually do instal other profiles you simply don't have to worry about selecting a lens profile for native lenses. The lens manufacturer's standard profile for the lens is always automatically applied for us.

 

New cameras will eventually force the software purchase. Watch for sales on LR5 at Christmas - you'll be able to get it for around $60. It does 90% of what you'll need for image editing and then you can buy Elements for less than $100 for the other stuff. Pas is a bloated behemoth that is not needed by most photographers, IMHO.

 

Chromatic aberration is messy with M43.

Some cameras, Panasonic, include CA correction data in the lens profile data so that gets applied automatically. Most Olympus bodies don't do that (I think the E-M1 may for some lenses) so you have to click on the chromatic aberration check box. It actually works quite well.

There's a second chromatic aberration called purple and green fringing which does not get corrected by the chromatic aberration control because it works in a different way. If you're seeing that you need to correct for it separately but it's a "semi-automatic" process that usually works quite easily and well. In the controls for correcting fringing there's an eye dropper tool. Select it, move it to an area with the worst fringing and click it on an area of fringing. Lightroom removes the fringing if it can. The only problem with this is that it does it essentially by eliminating a narrow colour band and if there are objects in the scene that have a colour that is in that band they will get changed as well. In my experience that very rarely happens and I'm almost always happy with the result.

I used to use Aperture before swapping to Lightroom. If you're unhappy with how ACR deals with Chromatic Aberration then don't try Aperture. I could never do a decent job in Aperture. ACR/Lightroom is actually very good for these problems once you get the hang of it.

BTW, when it comes to the processing side of thing Lightroom and ACR are identical. Lightroom builds ACR into what it calls a "Develop Module" and has other modules for file management, printing, sharing and so on. If you can't do something in ACR alone, then you can't do it in Lightroom on it's own either and you'll still need to go to whatever application you use for that bit of processing with ACR.