Phocus Rocks!

[BradP]

The subject says it all.

Just a quick positive feedback note for the Hasselblad folks and a user opinion for anyone contemplating using Phocus.  I've been shooting Hasselblad for only about 9 months now (X1D) mostly on landscapes.  I have been using Phocus for that and I knew it was good.  This last week though, I did my once a year community service stint shooting thousands of pics for a nonprofit event.  For raw developers, I used to use Lightroom (and C1, DXO, Aperture, and played around with a number of others), but this time I decided to try out Phocus.  Wow.  Am I impressed. 

Doing so many pictures so quickly really gives me a sense of the sliders and what they do, and that's a good thing I take from this annual ritual into my landscape work.  I'm not sure I can put everything that the sliders do into words (and I'm sure it's not in the manual or elsewhere I've found on the internet, although any links to that would be appreciated), but at least on FFF files it's something far more tailored and better in my view than what Lightroom does to Canon, Sony or Nikon files.   A few highlights:

* I'm particularly impressed with the pleasing and accurate colors (not using color cards) under all types of illuminates and white balance settings and the resulting great skin tones.  That's always been a bugaboo for me. 

* For the first time, I've found some real love for Phocus's highlight recovery slider, which before this week I had thought was pretty weak.  That was wrong.  It just does something different than Lightroom that's very useful even stretched well beyond 25 (my old limit) under certain conditions.  Specifically, I've found that it works nicely not only for blending in slightly blown out highlights, but also to manage color/tone in the highlights even when not blown out -- for example, spots that are too bright because of poor lighting on people's faces.

* The integrated ColorChecker (color card) feature works great, and it was nice to use without a plugin.  It was an art event, so I needed to use reproduction mode to photograph several hundred paintings in different venues.  Excellent.

* The new Adjustment Layers panel avoided ALL trips to Photoshop on this shoot.  It's certainly not as powerful, but serviceable enough for this shoot to keep me out of Photoshop which always has been a huge time drag.

* I've heard many people say they prefer Lightroom for its photo management capabilities.  I don't get that.  Maybe because of my background I'm used to computer file and directory structures and for me anyway I'm neutral on this. 

I've just been so happy with my experience I had to give out a shout.  There's certainly room for improvements (deconvolution sharpening would be awesome, as would luminosity-based adjustments in the Adjustment Layers panel), but I'm completely convinced now at least for me, Phocus is where I'm going to be doing all my raw development.  It was a completely unanticipated benefit of my buying into Hasselblad.  That was my ignorance.  It's definitely a great part of the deal. 

Great stuff Hasselblad.

[Alex]

Yep some things it does really well - simple straightforward and effective to a really optimised level. Other bits I'm pulling my hair out 

[Buddy]

yes, Phocus is ok but not as capable as e.g. Capture One. And we are still missing the camera profiles/cnfiguration feature.