New Phocus Adopter - Probably

[BradP]

I am a new Hasselblad X1D owner and have been trying to figure out whether I should use Phocus rather than Lightroom/Camera Raw.  There's precious little info out there that I can find on how Phocus operates differently from Adobe other than peoples' general "for" or "against" opinions, so I've been doing some research and personal comparisons to tease those out.  After doing that, I'm finding that I'm likely to adopt Phocus now for all my post processing with the X1D unless I have a file that has so much dynamic range I need to yank it in a bit at the edges with LR/CR. 

Here's the some concrete reasons for that conclusion (corrections or additional thoughts appreciated):

1. Phocus colors appear more natural and pleasing.  This is the case even when I use Colorchecker Passport to color correct the files with both raw developers.  There appears to be some Hasselblad secret sauce here that Adobe hasn't picked up on and maybe can't given its cross platform nature.  This seems related to a couple things.  (A) Hasselblad cameras and Phocus appear to operate within their own colorspaces, "Hasselblad RGB" (a colorspace near, but different than Adobe RGB) and "Hasselblad L*RGB" (a colorspace near ProPhoto RGB); and (B) Hasselblad uses some sort of algorithm (similar to a dual illuminate color profile, but apparently significantly more complicated) that ends up fine tuning colors based on the white balance adjustment.  I understand this conceptually, but how (B) is done is not perfectly clear.  If anyone knows of a more detailed description of how all this works please let me know.

2. While LR/CR's highlight recovery clearly pulls in a greater amount of highlight and shadow detail, it appears that most files (even landscape) can fit within Phocus's dynamic range and be adjusted very well with its more limited Recovery and Shadow Fill sliders.  Phocus cannot save blown out highlights that LR/CR can (and Phocus actually does a horrid job for badly blown highlights in relation to LR/CR), but for highlight areas that were close to properly exposed, Phocus's highlight Recovery slider IMO does a much better job (and LR/CR appear to apply sharpening to detail that isn't actually there). 

3. Initially I thought that LR/CR's exposure sliders gave more control of the histogram than Phocus's sliders.  That's true, but I found myself able to use Phocus's curve adjustment to manage a lot of what I use to manage with LR/CR's exposure sliders, and probably with better effect.

4. Colorchecker Passport and Colorchecker Digital SG are built into Phocus, appear optimized to the Hasselblad colorspaces (??), and creating them is a bit easier.

5. After I'm finished with all Phocus adjustments I can demosaic the whole shooting match to 16 bit TIFFs and work on them in Photoshop or my other 3rd party programs as always.

We'll see how it goes in time, but Phocus might be a nice unintended benefit from my switch to Hassy.  If now only now the X1D would get a firmware update for Live View highlight blinkies and/or Live View histograms, I wouldn't have to review each pic against the histogram to make sure the shot wasn't blown and the whole world will be right again!

[ganesh]

Thanks for your efforts. Very much appreciated!

Cheers
ganesh

[Hassilistic]

Hi BradP,

Thank you for that review.
For the information you requested, please see these links to previous posts on ICC & Phocus you may find what your looking for:

- http://www.hasselbladdigitalforum.com/index.php?topic=4671.0
- http://www.hasselbladdigitalforum.com/index.php?topic=4897.msg20401#msg20401

Please keep it up and add any additional findings you find.
Cheers

[BradP]

Thanks for the info and reminders on attaching a color space.