Olympus XZ-1 Art Filters

Using the Olympus XZ-1 Art Filters

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the Olympus XZ-1 here’s a brief introduction! It was released in 2011 and is a relatively high-end compact point-and-shoot digital camera.

At the time its specs were very good: It had a 10.0 Megapixel CCD sensor and featured an f/1.8 i.Zuiko lens. The zoom went from 6-24mm and it had an ISO range of 100-6400.

It is capable of shooting RAW and JPEG and allowed for full manual control as well automatic. It’s one of my favorite walkabout compacts and is capable of taking decent photographs. It will also accept the VF-2 EVF which in bright conditions is a lifesaver!

As an interesting aside it took me quite a while to find the VF-2 at a reasonable price and guess where I got it? Well, believe it or not, online from the San Francisco Leica store! It was $40 cheaper than anything I could get on eBay and it was in perfect condition and working order.

Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the XZ-1’s art filters.

What Is an Art Filter?

An art filter is basically preprogramed digital effects built right into your camera. It can change the colors, contrast, and overall appearance of your photos while you’re taking them rather than having to mess around post-processing.

These changes are sometimes quite subtle and sometimes not so much! Think of it as the earlier, version of those Instagram filters we all know. In other words it lets you get a very stylized, finished look right away, with no editing software needed.

What Art Filters Does the XZ-1 Have?

The Olympus XZ-1 has a total of six built-in special effect art filters.

Pop Art: Enhances colors making them very saturated, vivid, and as the name suggests the effect pops out at you.

Soft Focus: Gives a very traditional dreamy look which is very flattering for portraits.

Grainy Film: Converts your image from color to to high contrast black and white with a heavy grain that mimics film.

Pin Hole: Simply vignettes (darkens) the corners of you image and subtly alters the colors to produce an almost toy camera look.

Diorama: Blurs the top and bottom of an image while the central strip stays in focus. Very effective from a great height looking down onto roads with traffic.

Dramatic Tone: Contrast is dynamically boosted to produce a hyper-realistic HDR – high dynamic range.

How Useful Are They?

That really comes down to what sort of a photograph you are and what type of photographs you like taking. Personally, I don’t use them very often but every now and again it’s fun to go out and see what you can do. After all, shouldn’t photography be fun as well?

Final Words on the Olympus XZ-1 Art Filters

Most of the effects the camera can produce can of course be created in post=processing but it would be time consuming to do so. These filters take all the hard work out of it leaving you to concentrate on composition etc. etc.

I guess that the two filters I like the most are Grainy Film and Dramatic Tone. Both of those are really quite out there in their effect. Not everybody’s taste I know but we don’t all want to be the same do we?

One of the beauties of the XZ-1 is that you can shoot RAW and if you choose to use an art filter you’ll not only get a RAW image which does not have any effect applied but also a LN JPEG which will be recorded automatically alongside.