Phocus 2.9 Colour Calibration

[Chris Gahran]

Has anyone used and found the new Phocus 2.9 Colour Calibration to be a real improvement when shooting product photography? Headshots? Photo illustrations?

Or, is it's real advantage seen when doing reproduction photography? By that I mean reproduction of original artwork such as paintings?

Chris

[bdp]

Hi Chris,

I have created a custom profile using a colorchecker and now shoot with the reproduction tool ticked and in the L* RGB working space. I leave the reproduction mode box unticked though. I prefer the colour I get doing this.

Ben

[Alex]

Hi Chris,

I haven't had much time to play with it as yet - although now that 3.01 is out and much more stable than 2.92 & 3.00 I hope to run some comparisons with it and my usual profiles making software. It said on the readme that it would accept ref data from other (custom) scanned charts, however it rejected the rather standard layout data I gave it for an SG target so I have pretty much left it for moment.

For colorimetric QC verification deltae.com is a good free resource.

A

[davidthescot]

Hi Chris,

I have created a custom profile using a colorchecker and now shoot with the reproduction tool ticked and in the L* RGB working space. I leave the reproduction mode box unticked though. I prefer the colour I get doing this.

Ben

Hello Ben

I am new to Phocus as I have always used LR tethered before and only started using Phocus because the Hasselblad tether plugin has not been updated for the H6.  My normal workflow is to take a photograph of one of the colour checkers and then use this WB setting for the subsequent shoot.  This worked very well on my H4D with LR but i have struggled a little bit with the colour on the CMOS sensors (not unique to HB BTW).  in order to get the look I want I too have been fiddling with this and I wondered if I could ask a few questions?

1. What are the differences between ticking the reproduction mode tool and reproduction mode boxes?
2. What is the difference between the L*RGB and regular RGB modes?
3. Can you use the reproduction mode after tethered capture assuming that you have taken a colour checker image and calibrated it?

Any help would be appreciated.

[bdp]

Hi David,

Well I'm no expert regarding colour management and don't fully understand the science, but I just played around a little and discovered some ways to change the colour rendering in Phocus.

But I'll try to answer your questions:

1. Activating the reproduction tool by ticking it's box in the top right allows you to use custom made calibrations and use any of the other options in this tool. The 'reproduction mode' box at the bottom simply removes a built in film response curve if it is ticked, as far as I know, so the contrast is very flat with a linear response. This is different to the curves tool, which is a curve on top of the built in film curve that is built in to the factory profiles by default. I normally leave the reproduction mode box unticked lately.

2. I don't know the difference in technical terms, all I know is that the Hasselblad RGB working space is the default and the L* RGB gives a different look. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes the other. So I try them both on every image now.

3. Yes, you can save the calibrations and apply them to any image later.

There is another option in the reproduction tool I haven't tried, which is the Input Profile. Apparently you can create your own camera input profile with different software and use this for the input profile. I don't understand why you would do this AND use a custom colour calibration, but it's probably useful for something.

I'm finding my custom profile made with an old 24 patch colorchecker is giving me more pleasing colour in most cases compared to the factory profile.

Hope that helps a bit. The Phocus user manual has some good but basic info on this. It can be accessed in the Help menu.

Ben

[davidthescot]

Hi Ben

Thank you very much - most helpful.

David