About Olympus EP-1: ¿ Why Lightroom can't show difference between 2 RAW photos with different ISO?

Question

When I take RAW+JPG photos with my new Olympus PEN EP-1 which the unique difference is ISO and I import in Ligtroom:
- I can see difference between JPG photos.
- I can´t see any difference between RAW photos (In Olympus Master or Olympus Studio I can see difference). The problem is Ligtroom

Answer 1

There are two sides to your question. I. should Lightroom read all embedded
tags to a RAW file, and II. can it even technically do it.
The problem is that all of tags such as this exposure compensation one,
sharpening, picture styles, etc. are embedded in proprietary file formats
that the manufacturers will not disclose the structure off. Adobe (and every
other RAW converter out there that is not made by the camera manufacturer)
has to hack into the file format to figure it out, so question II can be
answered by "probably not" This is not Adobe's fault, but that of the camera
manufacturers not using a standard RAW format. Interestingly, for camera
manufacturers that use a standard format such as DNG (think LEICA for
example), a lot of camera settings actually translate into Lightroom
settings.
For question I, you have to figure out where you draw the line. Which
settings, on top of simply white balance (which Lightroom reads of course)
should the program read and use? Myself I think the program should display
the RAW data as accurately as possible. In the case of the "ISO bracketing"
that is not really ISO bracketing, the RAW data did not change at all. The
program should reflect this, if only to make the user realize that it is a
useless experiment and only a waste of card space. That said, it would be
nice if some settings translate, but that is made really hard due to the
proprietary file format.
>Would I expect Adobe implements how Olympus E-P1 works in next versions ?
I doubt it, but maybe somebody at Adobe is adventurous enough to reverse
engineer/hack your files to figure out where the compensation tag is stored,
so you never know.
This is however a very uncommon situation to encounter. Why would anyone
bother ISO bracketing if the camera doesn't ISO bracket at all! You're
better off just dialing in extra or less exposure in post. For me the
advantages of LR over typically glacial and badly written manufacturer
software is so large that small issues such as this do not begin to add up
to an argument to change workflow. In the end that's all personal of
course.