Phocus 2 upcoming features

[NickT]

Hi guys
In response to hywel's wishlist thread I thought I'd list out the major features of Phocus 2, there's a bunch of them and many are very cool IMO.

Tether pause. You can choose to stop images coming up in the viewer (though they will still come in) so for example an operator can check focus without having to wait for all images to finish loading.

Images are no displayed in the viewer with a single click.

Layout triggers. These are awesome. Say for example you attach a camera, Phocus will (if you want) switch to a tethered layout. If you say insert a CF card it will switch to a layout suited to importing, you can completely customise this behaviour.

CustomLayouts Ala Photoshop you can create your own custom layouts complete with floating pallettes.

Navigator zoom mode the detail window is back and it's better

Highlight recovery and shadow fill. Y'all know what these do.

Those are the big ones, there are a bunch of other neat tweaks, it's a great release, sorry no idea on timings.
Nick-T

[jimgolden]

Sounds like someone has been listening...

[C Radlund]

Great now I am finally going to have to upgrade my macs to intel machines. Will all of these functions be compatible with older backs? 22MS CF?
I hope all are well and busy.
Corey

[NickT]

Will all of these functions be compatible with older backs? 22MS CF?

I would say 99% yes. Not sure about the tether pause function with an older back (I still use a 384 quite often) but most of the features are in the software so will work on any file. I just requested a couple of over exposed files this morning with the highlight recovery tool, very impressive!
Nick-T

[yongsikshin]

Last week David dropped by in Seoul with Phocus 2.0 beta version. He showed the key features around and it was quite a sight to behold.

I was more than happy to see Flexcolor's favorite 'detail window' somehow managed to survive. It would've been great if it had multiple detail window like Flexcolor, but I suppose it might improve eventually.

You can also share your neatly customized layout with other Phocus users. (Yes, you can export your customized layout from Phocus and send it via e-mail.) I'd say this is one absolutely cool feature! 

I can already imagine hundreds of customized Phocus layouts floating around this forum... 

Yongsik

[Salian]

Waiting patiently.

Thought it was due three weeks ago.

It does sound cool.  Thanks for your tips.

[Valtteri]

One thing to have would be the skin tone-tool that apeared on C1 5. Pleasy Hassy, put this asap since I think that the skin tones is the hardest part to get right with Phocus. If any one have good settings or recipies for that, please share

[Hywel]

I agree, any tools along the lines of the C1 skin tone tool, or the Portraiture plugin, the Lightroom "reduce clarity to soften skintones" and/or a non-destructive healing/clone brush for getting rid of spots and pimples would be very welcome.

Anything that gets more of my workflow into one tool is good-intermediate TIFF files shipped into other programs are a pain and slow everything down.

  Cheers, Hywel Phillips

[Alex Maxim]

"reduce clarity to soften skintones" and/or a non-destructive healing/clone brush for getting rid of spots and pimples would be very welcome.

I believe the Phocus should have a set of basic tools, and most of them are already there, to export raw images to PS. Phocus is not meant as editing software. Healing, cloning etc. should be done in PS. If you are going to add the in Phocus you'll need layers, history palette, different blending modes and so on. Also imagine the speed of those complicated tools when working on a raw file. And I am afraid it will not be a free product with all those tools on board anymore and the price will be comparable with Photoshop. Does anyone want this to happen?

The skin tones... I have never had problems with skintones on Hasselblad, as long as the white balance is right everything is perfect. But that's a feature that could be added if many people want it.

[Dustbak]

Same here, I prefer Phocus to be good at what it needs to do. I sometimes use Onone Skintune to pick skintone but in many case skin is already looking very good. Maybe you should try this plugin to see whether it gives you the results you are after.

[Hywel]

I would make the counter argument that Aperture, Lightroom, which are the programs fulfilling the same RAW processor role, all have this basic non-destructive local editing functionality. The ability to clone out a dust spot which is at the same place in a thousand images from a studio shoot, and then tweak any where the result happens to be not right, is vastly superior to having to do it in photoshop.

In fact I'm taking all my 'blad shots to Lightroom for this, then exporting to JPEG from there (another thing missing from Phocus is overlay of watermarks for the web, and output sharpening, which is vital to offset the aliasing effect of a downsample from 31 megapixels to 1 megapixel, for example). I actually prefer Aperture, but Aperture chokes on the 180 MB 16 bit intermediate TIFFs, so Lightroom it is. I'll learn the quirks and foibles of any software if it saves me editing time.

With this workflow I do not need photoshop for 99% of my shots- a saving of literally days a month, since the LR/Ap workflow is vastly quicker and more efficient for processing sets of photos, as opposed to doing the perfect creative job on just one shot, which is what Photoshop is really designed for. My throughput doubled when I changed from Photoshop to Aperture for bulk production runs- saving me several days a month.  

I'd either like the RAW processing engine from Phocus to be fully integrated into (a stable future version of ) Aperture or Lightroom (with the same lovely colour rendition and corrections) or I'd like it to provide the functionality that is missing for my work. I realise that others' mileage may vary, but this is what I would like.

Creating thousands of 180 MB intermediate TIFFs to process the results of a photoshoot is a long-winded process and cannot be automated as much as one would like because of the need to tweak exposure for shots where the light was changing a bit outdoors. I don't want to have to do two passes through my images- I'd like to view, correct, tweak, rate and export in one intergrated workflow.

To be honest, Phocus right now is a bit of an anomaly. One needs to use it to get the best out of the camera, especially in terms of colour rendition, but its functionality does not allow one to use it as a replacement for the alternatives. I'm very happy that Hasselblad are actively developing it, and what it does, it does very stably and reliably and with very high quality results. But I'd definitely like to see either the Phocus engine in LR/Aperture/C1 or Phocus' feature set developed to include the bits of LR/Apeture that I can't work efficiently without.

In terms of what I need from skin tones, it isn't the colour rendition- that's already excellent. It is the ability to get rid of zits and spots, and smooth out acne, that is really lacking at present. I currently do that with the healing brush in LR/Aperture for minor blemishes, or with the Portraiture plug in from imagenomic, which is a semi-automated process of skin selection, three different radius blurs, and a few other bells and whistles. I use portraiture where there are more generalised skin smoothness issues or the whole thing is too much of mess to be able to face doing by hand for 150 shots!

The Portraiture plugin runs from directly inside LR or Aperture without the need to go to Photoshop but does need an intermediate TIFF. Capture1's new skin tone enhancer looks like it does a very similar job within C1. LR has a similar feature using masks and clarity reduction to smooth skin tones. I'd buy C1 tomorrow if it could do colour rendition and corrections the way Phocus does for 'blad files.

Frankly, if such an integrated tool existed today, I'd buy it even if it cost twice as much as photoshop. The time savings for me are that substantial. That's probably why I am making noise about the functionality that I need to get there I don't care who implements it, whether it is in Phocus or improved 'blad raw file handling in Ap/LR/C1 - but I do want it!

The closest alternative is probably DNG auto-export from Phocus, then straight into Lightroom, and that's something I'll look into when I've got through my current big batch of editing.

 Cheers, Hywel

[Dustbak]

I know where you are coming from. Look back through this forum and you will find similar remarks from me. I have made a workaround for myself in various ways in the mean time. I have created a two-step workflow that is fairly fast, I also use pretty fast hardware which helps. I don't want to be without the gorgeous rendering of Phocus and DAC. And to be frank when you have the processing power and can do most stuff automated it isn't a very big deal or delay.

I use the Bridge with the image processor to automate a lot of stuff, if you have exported to 8bit files you can also use ACR (Camera Raw) for batch removal of spots, etc... For most sessions I create 1 'basic' action that takes care of the major part of what I want to do, I tweak on a per image basis. I routinely process batches of 200 to 400 images that way. Photoshop is just a tool box with the Bridge, Camera Raw and the Image Processor you can tell PS what it needs to do on batches of photos and you have a vastly bigger toolbox than Lightroom.

Currently there is .3FR support in Lightroom, maybe we will eventually get .FFF support in Lightroom which would give you exactly what you are now asking for. However I am not sure it would give the same results as with Phocus, probably not. Even if there is full .FFF support in Lightroom I am not sure whether I would always use it.

There are a lot of ways to skin a cat but again I agree I would love to have .FFF support in Lightroom or (and preferably) a Phocus processor plug-in. If only to be able to archive my images.

[NickT]

Hywel
Some really excellent ideas in there. Some sort of processor plug in for Lightroom/Aperture would be great, in fact I had a chat about it with some Danes earlier in the year.

I would add that your workflow is different from mine and so requires a different approach. When I'm shooting people I will tweak the RAWS (adjust one then modify the others from that setup) then export previews (albeit unsharpened and un-watermarked) for a web gallery or contact sheet that the client can make selects from. Thus I'm not concerned about zits/dust bunnies until the final selects are made at which point I will individually process the chosen shots and retouch in PS. I always charge a per-shot cost in addition to a fee so that the more selects a client makes (and therefore the more work for me) the more I charge.

It seems to me that your workflow is different in that you are your own client and are delivering pretty much everything you shoot, do I have that right?
Nick-T

[Hywel]

Hi Nick,

  Yes, absolutely. I am essentially my own client, it is me who has to try to sell these photosets to the final customers, and so the main person they have to please is me.

  And the economics of website image production demands photos in sets- essentially telling the story of the scene. So I need to produce sets of 40-100 photos rather than get one perfect shot. As you say, that means I use essentially everything I shoot, obviously being selective for the best version of several minor variations on a shot and discarding anything technically deficient. I'd certainly be aiming to use 75% of what we shoot.

  At one update a day, that's around 50 photos a day that have to be polished well enough for the end user, at least when downsampled to 1280x1280 for web use. (We already put in a few full-size images from each set as a bonus, and I can see the day coming where we will have to offer the full resolution versions of every shot).

  End result: I have to produce around 1500-2000 photos every month to a reasonable final polish. I have to edit four or five videos, too. That takes about half my working time, so anything that saves 10% gives me an extra day off a month.

  For me saving a few keyboard strokes and mouse clicks on every image really starts to add up- that's the main difference I found when I moved from Photoshop to Aperture. It wasn't what I could do, it was how quickly I could do the basic operations. Photoshop has a very long history, and it is a great tool for doing all manner of complicated things to make a single great image, but it is just not set up with a view to processing sets of photos quickly. Aperture on the other hand gives me all the basic operations in a very slick and polished workflow.

Phocus is OK, Lightroom is passable though its Modal operation does put unnecessary barriers in the way of really slick workflow, one can get used to it... (Adobe never seems to use a single click or keystroke when three would do- it is the same in Photoshop and Premier Pro for me. I seem to just think and work in an orthogonal way to the way Adobe wants me to).

Even little stuff helps. I redefined the shortcut for "go to next photo" to be just right-arrow rather than command-right-arrow makes everything a fraction of a second quicker- it is easier to do that one handed without taking the other hand off the mouse or tablet. It adds to the fluidity, which adds to speed. Hooray for being able to redefine shortcuts on a Mac! 

 

  Cheers, Hywel.

[HughGilbert]

I saw David the other day at a conference (of mostly museum photographers) and he tells me that the input values are going to be available to adjust on the histogram... good for reproduction work. 
Whilst there, Capture One (Shiver) demonstrated a feature in their new software that shows areas in focus.  I like that.
It's a bit like the over and under warnings., and again really useful for a quick check to see what is in focus without having to pay close attention!

David also muttered about Phocus 2 being available in two weeks....

Have a good day all...Thames is gurgling along quietly today... been very full recently

Hugh