One of the most fantastic things about the Olympus Pen F is its colour wheel! I haven’t seen this feature on any other camera and it’s a brilliant way to start your colour editing process early in camera…It’s super simple, the best thing you can do is spend a little time working out your own custom setting with the colour settings that suit you. I have two settings – a super saturated one, and a less saturated one, depending on what mood I am in. As I still (I know, shock horror!) shoot in JPEG as opposed to RAW, there are times I don’t want to lose colour information. But I’ve discovered that in the end, my out-of-camera editing ends up super de-saturated anyway!
1. So first of all, you need to set the Mode wheel on the front left of the camera (facing it) to COLOUR.
SELECTING THE RIGHT MODE
2. Then you need to toggle right (although sometimes it’s left depending on the camera) to bring up the colour wheel on screen. You should have everything at normal settings but if you need to reset, hold down the OK button.
TOGGLE TO BRING UP THE COLOUR WHEEL
3. To adjust individual colours make sure the colour ring with the dots is not highlighted by pressing INFO, and that there’s a dotted line that runs through the colour. Use the OK circular wheel to adjust the strength of the colour up or down.
NOW IS THE TIME TO EXPERIMENT TO FIND THE EFFECT YOU LIKE… I FOCUS ON PULLING DOWN THE YELLOWS & GREEN MAINLY, THEN A LITTLE RED AND A LITTLE PURPLE…
AND LOWER YELLOW AS WELL AS GREEN TO ADJUST GREEN…
YOU CAN SATURATE OR DESATURATE ALL THE COLOURS AT ONCE
4. To adjust all the colours at once, press INFO to highlight all the colours at once and use the OK wheel to adjust up and down.
CREATE YOUR CUSTOM SETTINGS…
- 5. To save your settings, press Menu and in Shooting Menu 1, select Reset/Assign Custom Modes. Choose C1 or 2/3/4 and press OK to save your settings. Remember this will also save all the other settings you are currently in like aperture, ISO, WB etc.
All shot on the Olympus Pen F with the 25mm 1.2 lens – use JULIA25 for 25% off the E-PL8 model & various lenses at Olympus checkout, valid until 31 Sep.
16 responses to “Olympus Pen F Tips | How To Use The Colour Wheel”
Nice tutorial simply explained. I love my Pen F. I am slowly returning to simple jpeg output. I haven’t tried editing in the camera yet. Time to do a little experimenting.
Ah great stuff! Glad to hear it 🙂
Thanks for more information on the Pen F. Can’t believe I missed the offer – I am SOOO behind on my blog reads.
Ah good news! The offer is extended til 31 September! 🙂 xx
Hi Julia
I tried to buy the Pen F through Olympus yesterday but they wouldn’t honour the code. They said it had expired. I spoke with someone on the telephone and via e-mail but they wouldn’t do it. Not your fault but thought I should say. 🙁
Hi Nicole – yes I know. I am so sorry, there was a miscommunication over the code application. I now have a new code that is for the E-PL8 model & various lenses xx
your cursive handwriting is hard to read and therefore is a distraction.
Oh yes I’m sorry about that! I had a site design update and it changed this, so I need to go back in and amend older posts – apologies!
Thank you! How many profiles can be saved in each custom setting on the dial?
There’s 4 in total … 🙂
Please help! This Olympus rep in this video says you can save up to 15 custom profiles! How do you do that? Watch the video starting at 3 minutes into it….https://youtu.be/2fvEcRE29wM
Hmmm, I’m not sure to be honest! What he says is – “…up to 15 different possible profiles saved” which isn’t exactly the same as saving 15 custom profiles – as far I know you can only save 4 Custom Profiles using the Colour Wheel & Shadows/Highlights. I’ve checked the manual and can’t see it described like this either. Might be worth sending a tweet to @olympusuk on Twitter, as they have tech people there who can advise! Although curious to know why you might need 15 different profiles 😉
I cant access the color wheel on my pen f.
The mode dial on the camera front (right of lens) needs to be set to Colour the toggle the switch on back of camera at the top
Hello Julia, thank you for the tutorial. Could you please show the complete colour wheel settings? You mentioned red and purple, but didn’t show how to manipulate this colour.
Does the final effect look like on top of your post where you took a picture of the the Pen F on the table? That looked really nice!
Best regards
Lars
Hi Lars! Thankyou 🙂 you select the colours on the wheel
using the circular control panel to the right of the screen, this allows you to toggle around the wheel and lower or higher the saturation of each – I only ever pull the reds and purple done a little bit. Actually these pictures will have been taken on another Olympus Pen but once without the colour wheel.