The B&W look fantastic (do I see a Leica look
. What's your workflow? You mention slightly superior DR and somewhat less noise of the OM-D. On the other hand, the output from the G1X looks less digital to mee than what I see online from the Olympus. Maybe it's your PP which does the magic.
Thank you, but I don't think there's too much magic involved on my part! My b&w workflow on the G1X is basically the same as I use for any camera.
- Open the raw file in Adobe Camera Raw and mess with the recovery, fill light, and exposure sliders to draw out the highlights and shadows and get the exposure right.
- Apply some mild noise reduction if necessary
- Apply a filter in Nik Silver Efex. Over time I have played with just about every filter and effect in Silver Efex, but now I use the one filter about 95% of the time which is a modified, milder and frameless version of the "Fine Art, High Key, Framed" filter. I don't touch the film, noise, vignette, or burning options anymore.
- The SFX filter pushes the histogram to the right, so I adjust the tone curve to pull back some of the darker shades to a true black and give the image some contrast
- Sometimes I will open the image in Nik Color Efex and add a low strength color tint through the "Cross Processing" filter, or a vignette with the "darken/lighten center" filter (NOT the vignette filter!).