Phocus 2.5 impressions and review

[Ali Alriffai]

I thought it'll be good to start new thread while we all downloading the 2.5, note and tip always welcomed 

[jeff.grant@pobox.com]

That link doesn't work, and there's nothing on the What's New page. Has it been taken down?

[Monty Rakusen]

So you've tried it......

and before I download it.....

does it work?

Is it any better?

(I'm not interested in the other file formats)

Monty

[alexkent]

is it any better?

YES!

for Hasselblad only users:

- sharper previews. with or without lens distortion correction.
- no more horrid little arrows at the bottom of the tool area.

those two alone are great. then theres:

- shot info on the top of the viewer
- better filtering of the thumbnail view
- improved keywording (i'm told, although i don't use this myself)
- full image printing
- slideshow
- highlight recovery no longer broken on 32bit machines with ATI cards (my pet bug)

does it work?
yeah i think so, i didn't get to hammer on it as much as i'd have liked towards the end of the beta cycle, but i'm using it now with no problems.
suffice to say, i think 2.5 is a great release.

[alexkent]

Oh yeah and the 3rd party raw support thing, whilst it is getting a lot of hype, IMHO isn't that useful (i'm sticking to ACR: more sliders, faster for me).
But, along with the 3rd party raw support comes the ability to browse/view all kinds of non-raw images from within Phocus. i find this very useful, i can check reference images, compare with previously exported tifs, etc.
I find i switch applications less now.

alex.

[Dustbak]

I love the read-out tool. I am also glad there is now a short-cut for multishots but I would still like a button as well It has been rock solid sofar in my environments. I have been able to get it to crash on only 2 occassions or so which is great. I still think performance needs to be improved but in the meantime I ordered a new 15" i7 MBP together with a 256Gb Crucial SSD (which I regret since I should have gotten the OWC).

The ability to process other raw files is a nice bonus that might attract other DSLR users that do not want to use one of the other tools which in majority costs money. When it delivers tethered shooting it will be a totally different ball game I think.

[mauro risch]

Installed and working well so far.
MBP 17' and on Macpro. Just fine.
I'm happy we are still getting better versions and updates.
Can't let CS5 go. It is simply the best after my fffs are exported into tiff-16, 223MB files.
Cheers,
Mauro Risch

[QDFB]

Most of the changes are not Mac-specific so I trust, writing as a PC user, a version of 2.5, with or without other raw file format support, will be out for the PC soon.

I recall, as a one-time Imacon scanner user, that PC iterations of software upgrades lagged up to 6 months behind Mac upgrades.  That is not acceptable when we are paying a substantial sum for the camera and are entitled to expect platform parity.

Quentin

[alexkent]

I recall, as a one-time Imacon scanner user, that PC iterations of software upgrades lagged up to 6 months behind Mac upgrades.

you may also remember that Phocus v2.0 was a simultaneous release for Mac and PC. I understand 2.5 Pc is in beta at the moment, i'm sure the release will be soon.

alex.

[yongsikshin]

Now Phocus supports Korean language. Kudos to Hassy R&D guys! 

[QDFB]

I recall, as a one-time Imacon scanner user, that PC iterations of software upgrades lagged up to 6 months behind Mac upgrades.

you may also remember that Phocus v2.0 was a simultaneous release for Mac and PC. I understand 2.5 Pc is in beta at the moment, i'm sure the release will be soon.

alex.

Before my time, Alex    I am a new H4D-50 owner, but a one-time Imacon Photo scanner owner who used to get miffed at being treated as a second class citizen just because I used a PC.  I hope you are right.

Quentin

[jeff.grant@pobox.com]

It was the flakey porting of Flexcolor on the PC that helped me make the change to a Mac. I lost count of how many times I would find a problem on the PC that didn't exist on the Mac.

[QDFB]

It was the flakey porting of Flexcolor on the PC that helped me make the change to a Mac. I lost count of how many times I would find a problem on the PC that didn't exist on the Mac.

That's Hassy's fault, not the OS.  These days there is no material difference between them.   I have no intention of changing platforms.

Quentin

[jeff.grant@pobox.com]

You may be right as I avoid Windows like the plague these days, but I doubt that it has reached the level of integration of the Mac yet. Case in point, I deleted an app yesterday and then discovered that I still needed it. It was an old version which would have required a new licence to download again, and I didn't have the install files. On the Mac, I went to Time Machine and simply reloaded it. On a Windows machine with registries etc, I wouldn't have even tried YMMV

[Hywel]

Quick question... does anyone know of a way to force the Keywording panel to a particular number of columns? In previous versions it always gave me exactly two columns of keywords, which I liked. In version 2.5, it seems to give me a random number of coulmns from two to four for my various keyword sets.

This is particularly odd since in order to do four columns it has to truncate some of the keywords, which is not so good when looking through one's controlled vocabulary quickly trying to spot a word or pair of words. So "business wear" becomes busines... and "pencil skirt" becomes "pencil s..." which is far from ideal.

I also find it much harder to scan through the various sets quickly with the number of columns changing like that.

I'd really like to force it to two columns for all keyword sets. Is there a way to do that?

  Cheers, Hywel.