OM-3 Color Recipes
The OM-3 color wheel offers a fun way to experiment with color while shooting. There’s a resonance with your (the photographer’s) emotional state with the image. Seeing your pictures painted in vibrant, subdued, or contrasty monochrome while you shoot pulls you into the moment and inspires you to keep shooting.
But there are a lot of options, and it isn’t as easy as one might like to switch between them. This page will host the information I learn and the recipes I discover or create for use with my OM-3.
The Basics
The color wheel has five modes — one is normal mode, one is CRT (color creator which exists in other Olympus/OM-System cameras), one is ART mode (featuring the classic art modes included in previous Olympus cameras), one is Color mode (only in OM-3 / PEN-F) and one is MONO model (only for OM-3 / PEN-F).
Unfortunately you can’t re-program these dial modes. So even if you have no use for any of the ART or CRT modes, you can’t re-purpose those dial settings.
CRT
Change Vivid setting from -4 to +3 for all or one particular color.
The CRT mode allows you to change saturation for one particular color. This can impart a yellow or blue overtone across the entire image. I don't find much use for this mode. The Dragons Father mentions in this thread that he uses the CRT dial as a Leica Mono clone. The only way I can image that working is if the vibrance is pulled all the way to -4.
Change to vibrance are saved across camera on/off and non-custom mode dial (P/A/S/M/B) changes. Each custom mode dial (C1-C5) can retrain its own individual settings.
ART
Use one of Olympus’s ART mode filters.
This dial mode functions the same way the ART mode dial does on the older and lower-end models (like the E-M5/OM-5 line). You can choose an art mode and customize it with effects like frames and vignettes and filters or grain for B&W.
As with CRT, changes persist across reboots and between mode dial switches for normal P/A/S/M/B modes, but are saved separately for each custom mode. This operates as I would expect, and it would be nice if I used ART modes often. As it stands the two B&W art modes seem the most appealing. The others seem over-done and played out, like instagram filters of a decade ago.
COLOR
Create and use one of four custom color profiles.
This is the main distinguishing feature of the color dial. You can define four custom pictures modes, each with customizable saturation for 12 individual colors, a customizable tone curve allowing shadows, mid-tone, and highlight adjustments, vignettes, sharpness, and contrast. This allows you to dial and access basic color grading settings with the built in jpeg engine.
As with other modes, changes to these color profiles are saved between on/off cycles, and between normal modes (P/A/S/M/B). But each custom mode (C1-C5) retains its own separate settings.
I was a little surprised and disappointed at how limited these are, and how they are relatively difficult to switch between. The dial puts you into color mode, but you have to use the super control panel to switch between them. There is no option to have a button or dial switch between modes. And you can’t assign color modes to ART or CRT modes.
It’s also regrettable that these profiles aren’t tied to white balance (which is frequently included in film simulations). That means multiple setting changes to try to implement a particular film mode. You really need to lean into the C1-C5 custom modes if you want to quickly switch between color profiles.
MONO
Use one of four custom monochrome profiles.
This dial mode functions much the same as the COLOR dial, except each of the four profiles is monochrome.
You can define color filters for eight colors (yellow, orange, red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, yellow-green) in 3 levels of intensity. You can also adjust the tone curves for shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. As with COLOR you can adjust vignetting, sharpness, and contrast.
With MONO you can also add film grain with three levels (low/medium/high) and define the color overtones (sepia, blue, purple, green).