Phocus wish list

[Dustbak]

The week has past

Today I tried to use Phocus in a shoot which will go on for the next week. Phocus turned out to be a big no-go. Here is why and what I would like to be done about it.

Several times a year for various fashion brands we are shooting the collection on dolls for the webshop, print, catalogue, etc.. Nicest way to do this is to shoot in single shot mode while the stylists are working on the items. As soon as the stylists believe it is fine the shot is taken in multishot.

Here already Phocus falls short. I need to be able to see from the thumbs what I am dealing with, eg. a single shot file or a multishot file. This is buried too deep! I would like to have it like it was in Flexcolor.

It gets worse!

After having done the 4-shot in many cases the stylists want to have other variations on what they have just done, eg. necklace, bags, other shoes, etc.. This means again singles until perfection followed by a multishot. By now it is virtually impossible in Phocus to determine which files are the correct ones without clicking on each file.

Allright, I thought I will do this and set the approval level of the file that is multishot (and correct because sometimes you need to repeat a multishot because flashes didn't go off or, other movement) to yellow.

This made things even beyond worse...

I now found out that setting the approval level of more files is a dicey process. I later found out that some files that I turned yellow were still green, other files that needed to be green had become yellow, etc.. This made Phocus totally unreliable.

After 2 hours of screwing around I switched to Flexcolor and finished the day without further problems.

I really really like it that I can see in the Flexcolor icon in the dock how many items it still needs to process. Could that be in the next version of Phocus as well??

Another thing I really really like in Flexcolor is the ability to process files in the background and continue to work. I process while the stylists are preparing the next setup. The fact I can do this means when I come home at night I can play with the Wii with my son instead of sitting behind the screen. It shaves a couple of hours from my day! Thank you Hasselblad .

Another thing I really miss that was in Flexcolor is the EV (or composite light) value that shows right next to the RGB values. This comes in very handy! As well as the scale on the histogram. The histogram in Flexcolor is lacking but it is already so much better than in Phocus.

Sorry guys, but for my taste Phocus needs a lot more improvement. Flexcolor might be not so sexy looking but it is still my tool of choice for the moment.

[NickT]

Here already Phocus falls short. I need to be able to see from the thumbs what I am dealing with, eg. a single shot file or a multishot file. This is buried too deep! I would like to have it like it was in Flexcolor.

I quite agree, I know that this is on the wish list for 1.2 Multi-shot users speak up!

I really really like it that I can see in the Flexcolor icon in the dock how many items it still needs to process. Could that be in the next version of Phocus as well??

This too is on the wishlist!

Another thing I really really like in Flexcolor is the ability to process files in the background and continue to work. I process while the stylists are preparing the next setup. The fact I can do this means when I come home at night I can play with the Wii with my son instead of sitting behind the screen. It shaves a couple of hours from my day! Thank you Hasselblad .

Not sure what you mean here.. Phocus will happily process in the background..

Thank you very much for the post, I know for a fact that certain influential Danes read this thread

Nick-T

[Dustbak]

Not sure what you mean here.. Phocus will happily process in the background..

Nick-T

I did not get that far with Phocus too often but the times I did it did slow down the capturing process significantly. Much more so than Flexcolor does.

[robertpoll]

Derek,

The mac version has a small up and down arrow at the bottom of the tolls panel section. Its not there in the PC Beta, and have reported it to Hasselblad.

...rob

[robertpoll]

Derek,

There's no hand tool, but if you ctrl and drag you can pan around the image; the equivalent of space drag on the mac.

...rob

[Dustbak]

I would like to have in the 'Job Info' panel the option to use 'spaces' in the 'name' field. This might sound weird but I prefer to be able to use 'name' 003.fff instead of 'name'0003.fff for instance. This is not possible currently unless you edit it in 'File Name' but in that case it only works for the current job and you have to do that again if you start shooting on another job. This is not really handy!

[stewhem]

I know it's been mentioned but I'll repeat it because for me it's such a bummer: please can we have a sharp preview? Having to zoom in to test sharpness on 100's of images is not a professional workflow.

[Eivind Røhne]

I would very much like to see a fourth approval level and color. Let's call it the green of the greens.

The reason is this: I never delete files, only use the colors to separate them. Reds are out (but not deleted), yellows are maybe's (for comping etc), and greens are those who make the cut and ends up on the contact sheets for the client. Either selected in the studio or on location by me, the client, or usually both of us together. And these greens can be something like 4-6 images of the same pose/wardrobe/situation etc. Shortly (days) after they have reviewed and discussed the contact sheets back at the office, the client chooses only one from these greens to actually use. So therefore, I would like to have a fourth color so you can mark which image the client actually chose to use/print/publish as their final image, and still keep the selected range of all the others.

[Dustbak]

Has anyone alread mentioned the wish of having focus bracketing and auto-blending in Phocus? That I would really consider being useful (even when combined with the HTS). With the lens data known to Phocus it should be able to know which part of which image is in phocus so also what parts it needs to blend in and what parts not.

[Dustbak]

Yes, that first please 

Sorry, I promised not to mention anything else until we had at least 64sec & ISO800.

[Andre Regini]

A neutralisation picker where the sample size can be altered.

Photoshop has a crude sample averaging method - Point, 3 by 3, 5 by 5 etc in normal editing screen, and a zoom dependant sample size in the RAW/DNG converter. The best one I ever saw though was years ago in Paintshop Pro (!), that used a marquee tool to define the averaging area. Particulary good because you could not only define, but also see the area used.

Andre Regini

[eauliv]

Wish list
Not a browser on the left (and his "use this folder  as capture destination") and a full capture destination in the job info tool on the right. One tool  one place
Not a annoying (I'm polite) "user registration" at each start
Not a compare view illogical twisting and illogical merging/mixing 
Not a double clic to open images in the thumbnails. Simple clic is great. See competitor
Not waiting 3 s to see the file number after the image display
Not a crashing software when you process still capturing
Not a crashing software when you process and making adjustements on other pictures
Not a historical process queue vanished after crashing
Not a green initial aproval level after at least 10 try  to to change it to yellow and 1 year waiting the correction of this bug
Not a complete lost of all settings ans preferences after crashing
Not a "next sequence number" reset after crashing....Imagine
Not a hidden adjustements list
etc...

[Alastair Bird]

Not sure if this is the case in Phocus, but when you try to save files in Flexcolor and there are files there that are already named the same as what you're trying to save, the option is to overwrite them or cancel the save.  It would be great to be able to say 'no' to over writing the files and still have the balance of the files write. I find I often process out a few files and can't remember which one was the last one I saved, but I can't select everything and only have the ones that have not yet been processed get processed out.

And a warning box when you shut down Flexcolor when files are still coming in from the buffer would be great, too.  You get one when you try to quit and it's building previews, but not when it's importing files from the buffer.

I didn't see a wishlist thread for Flexcolor, so I'm posting it here.  Sorry if there is a thread.

[stephanbruehl]

• To my opinion it is annoying that Phocus shows an empty directory if there is no fff file in it. Since the fff files can be seen at least with a preview in the explorer, this would be nice vice versa for tif and jpg files within Phocus.
  
• I am mainly interested in b&w pictures. The export option to grayscale tif, however, is totally useless, if there is no possibility to apply filters, resp. tune the different color channels for the grayscale representation (like e.g. in Adobe RAW). So at the moment I have to export to the large RGB tif files to apply afterwards the b&w conversion in Photoshop. It would save a large amount of disk space if one could apply a suitable filtering within Phocus and then export directly to 8-bit or 16-bit grayscale tif files   

Stephan

[alexkent]

Wish list
Not a annoying (I'm polite) "user registration" at each start

you know if you just fill that in once, it goes away forever ?
(and if you've internet access you can retrieve all the details automatically from your hasselblad.com online registratioon)

regards, alex.