How OM System color recipes work

With the creative dial turned to COLOR, these cameras let you set the saturation of 12 colors independently. That gives you a fair amount of control over the styles you can get straight from the camera, without post-processing raw files.

The MONO position works the same way for monochrome profiles. Instead of per-color saturation you choose color filters and their strength, add grain, and control the general color cast (sepia, blue, and so on). Most of the monochrome options are also available on camera models without a creative dial.

The dial also has ART and CRT positions. Those are heavier-handed and less commonly used, and this site does not currently support recipes that rely on them.

OM System’s customization is more limited than some other camera systems or computer-based editing: there is no per-color hue or luminance adjustment, only saturation. To work around this, many recipe authors use white balance shifts — particularly amber and magenta — to nudge hues.

The point is a finished-looking image straight out of the camera. A few reasons that appeals to people:

• It’s easy and fun to share right away — camera to phone to shared, done. Not for the masterpieces, but for a lot of day-to-day photography.
• It moves you closer to visualizing the final image while you’re still shooting, the way Ansel Adams did.
• It’s a low-pressure way to learn about processing techniques and color theory.
• You can still shoot raw alongside JPG and lose almost nothing — just a little drive space.

Like most camera makers, OM System supplies its own raw processing software. It doesn’t offer masking like Lightroom, but it covers the standard basic adjustments.

OM Workspace has a rough analog to Lightroom presets called batch processing files, with the extension .oes. Every recipe here can be represented as an OES file, and the site lets you download one so you can try a recipe on your own images. See the OM Workspace guide.

The camera writes recipe settings into the extended EXIF data of the JPGs it produces. This site reads those fields to parse a recipe out of a camera JPG, so creating a recipe is as simple as uploading a JPG with novel settings and giving it a name.

To keep things focused on sharing recipes for in-camera use, the site only accepts images that come directly from the camera with no further editing. Every sample image on the site came from a creative-dial camera without computer-based processing.

There are currently two ways:

1. Enter the settings by hand using the camera controls — see the manual entry guide.
2. Use OM Workspace with the camera connected over USB to load a recipe stored in a straight-out-of-camera JPG into one of your Color Profile slots — see the JPG workflow.

It would be far more convenient if this could be done wirelessly from a phone. Until then, manual entry is often the best and sometimes the only option, so the site presents recipe information in a way that makes it quick to enter by hand.

OM System publishes a Creative Recipes page with recipes from various creators. It only offers a download link to the original JPG, though — there is no way to see the details of a recipe without OM Workspace and a computer. Its “share your recipe” button also doesn’t always result in a recipe being featured.

This site exists to ease those pain points. Anyone can share a recipe here as long as it follows the guidelines and comes from a straight-out-of-camera JPG, and every recipe’s details are laid out visually to help with manual entry and general understanding.