Northwest Dive Club

I have a TG-4 that I use as a backup. Great little camera that does some cool stuff, plus like having that extra level of protection of a waterproof camera in a housing.
One of the big selling points is that it is one of the few cameras in its category that shoots RAW. I use RAW in my other Olympus to good effect, but what I get from the TG-4 is awful. Here's a gunnel pic taken with it, cropped down and blown up to 100% (f18; ISO 100). Looks OK in the jpeg:
here's the same pic, same size in a TIFF (converted from the ORF, and brightened up a little):


Any idea why it is such a grainy mess?

A lot of the RAW converters out there are awful. They produce really bad images like that, and don't look nearly as good on initial import. Lightroom's imports of Nikon cameras are notorious for that. They say its up to you to fix it. Usually that means adding more contrast, and lowering shadows, but yes generally hard to get something as good as the jpeg. There are also some presets out there that attempt to fix it. Or try using different importing software like Capture One, or for best results a first party program if that program doesn't totally suck...

Oh, also up the sharpening and the noise reduction...

I second that on RAW. The TG-4 is useless for me, the crazy thing I use the same Raw converter on my Olympus M5 and it works just fine.