Flex to Phocus - Colour adjustment lost

[Andre Regini]

Forgive me if this has already been raised, but still getting my head round Phocus (PC OS).

I'm using Phocus to process out and Flex to capture tethered on a laptop.

Did a clothing product shoot yesterday with an established client. Had the usual issue of some colours not matching so adjusted them in Flex using the dropper in colour correction & hey presto sorted as I always do. Now when I pull it into Phocus all that work seems to have been undone. I've got round it by opening the adjusted image in Flex and using the HSL adjutments (which I've always hated) in Phocus to get as close as I can.

PC Phocus for me is still flakey. Always crashing, so until it settles down there is no way I'm putting it in front of client on a shoot. Trying to use it as much as a I can in post, and really wanting the Moire filter, but am I really going to loose all the colour adjustments I make in Flex?

Andre

[alexkent]

i believe you will loose changes made in the Flexcolor 'color correction' palette when moving files to Phocus. i don't expect this situation to change in the future.

hasselblad made the decision to replace the numeric colour change palette in Flex with the hsl colour wheel palette in Phocus.
it is unfortunate that you don't get on with the hsl approach. i personally welcome the change; i am often teaching this software and i think in general people find the hsl dialog more intuitive than a (rather opaque) grid of numbers.

regards, alex.

[alexkent]

Derek, i respectfully disagree
The colour wheel design is more than just eyecandy:
- You are making a targeted change to a (controllable) range of the hues (rather than picking a preset, primary or secondary color)
- The design of the tool (dragging a line across a colour wheel) give you a obvious scale to the change you're making: drag a line from red to yellow, you know the red is going yellow, you also know how yellow it'll be, what the maximum amount of yellow it could be.
- Dragging with the mouse and live feedback in the viewer make it possible to set colours by eye in realtime.
- You can see all of your corrections at once (as opposed to switch through corrections for each colour).

In contrast the Flex approach was, in my opinion, far from logical:
- If i want my Greens to be more Yellow, i switch to Green then do i add Y or subtract B ? and how much ?
- The scale goes from -500 to +500 for each component colour, what does that relate to ?
- If i'm outputting in RGB, how exactly do the CYM numbers relate ? Are they connected to a CMYK softproof internally within Flex? Which CMYK profile is it using?
- If i enter numbers which cancel each other out (even partially) will that actually make no change to the image or will it translate the colours in both directions and cause tonal compression and banding ?

alex.

[robertpoll]

Is Alex's statement correct? i.e. colour adjustments made in flex will be lost when the image is opened in Phocus? If so then this is a major problem as we won't be able to reproduce correct versions of images from our archives. I'm sure Phocus was advertised as being 'backwards compatible' and if this is correct then it isn't...?

...rob

[alexkent]

that's an interesting point Robert,
certainly with current releases of Phocus, changes made with the Flexcolor Color Correction tool which are stored in the .fff file are lost when you process that file from Phocus.
i am only speculating about the future.

in the wider context of Raw developers, the idea of backward compatibility is a little vague. i mean, with all the changes in Flexcolor over the years i wouldn't expect an image exported from 4.8.8 to be identical to one processed in 3.6.x.

the only exception to this is Aperture i think; Apple have included the ability to select which version of their raw engine to process an image with, so you can expect to get perfect backward compatibility as the application moves forward.

alex.

[alexkent]

sorry Derek, i didn't mean to jump at you. i think it was quite late at night when i posted that.

regards, alex.

[robertpoll]

Hi Alex,

I see what you mean Alex (re new versions of raw processors and colour). I guess though that's somewhat similar to the variation you'd get printing on a different paper batch or a different mix of developer so is perhaps easier to live with. To lose all of the colour adjustments though is a bit lame I think. I'll see if I can find out whether there's a plan to address it.

...rob

[Eivind Røhne]

I suggest to Hasselblad that their programmers carry over all adjustments from FC FFF files into Phocus where a direct relationship (control to control (i.e. adjustment to adjustment)) exists.

I've just started dabbling around with Phocus, and as far as I can see, all of the adjustments I've done with H1D fff files is carried over to Phocus. Both wb, sharpening, curves and others. Haven't tested color corrections though.

[alexkent]

... carry over all adjustments from FC FFF files into Phocus where a direct relationship (control to control (i.e. adjustment to adjustment)) exists.

that's the sticking point though isn't it; there isn't a direct control to control relationship for Colour Correction between Flex and Phocus.
i believe everywhere that the controls do directly relate (everything except ColCorrection and the new tools) Phocus does carry Flexcolor adjustments.

regards,
alex.

[Andre Regini]

Wow.. talk about Pandora's box..

Sorry guys been away from the forum since my original posting and have just read the replies.

I can quite see why some like the colour wheel and others prefer the colour adjustment tool. To me they are a solution to the same problem i.e. doing the maths. I do find it very difficult to understand why Phocus has not been designed to take all the data from a Flex file and produce the same output. To me this would be a fundamental tennant that the programmers would be made to adhere too. I can quite understand that the input methodology is the same, so why have the programmers chosen not give the choice of using either method in Flex?

Derek I'm afraid I did not write software, but I did head up teams of software engineers for 15 years and I'm afaid I was one of those guys who would have been telling you what to do. My boss's answer when anything failed was "it's only maths... just do it!" and he was always right.

Personally I like the old method. I can look at a colour on the screen, look at the garment I'm shooting and immediately say (eg?) "that blue needs more red". I then pick that colour and adjust the saturations until I'm happy. I had to replicate a colour alteration in Phocus that had been done in Flex (because I wanted the moire reduction) and 20 minutes later I was still struggling and couldn't achieve it.

Also discovered that the neutral picker in Phocus produces inconsistent colour temperatures (Flex is totally consistent). But I'll put that in a new post.

Andre

[Andre Regini]

My point is Derek that there is rarely an excuse for fundamental incompatibility issues such as this. This isn't a minor irritation. Apart from the issue regarding preference of the colour wheel or RGB/CMY adjustment (both methods should have been implemented in my opinion), any FFF files that have been colour corrected using Flex will process out incorrectly in Phocus. Moreover, you will need to know that the image has been colour corrected in Flex, which I believe you will only be able to do if you open the image in Flex and check the colour correction settings. Not particularly clever.

Just to clear something else up, I am not and wasn't just a manager. I was in my time (22 years) variously a Senior, Principal Design and Systems Electronics Engineer and consultant.

Andre Regini