Hasselblad: Phocus Or Lightroom

[PSS]

I guess it is not about the software. It is about the profiles. Who has the better sensor and lens profiles for Hasselblad systems, Adobe or Hasselblad ?

afaik Hasselblad has worked with adobe and the profiles are shared, there is not much info on the subject, other then Hasselblad has said they HAVE shared the profiles, but in the same breath Hasselblad maintains that they still have some secret sauce....I am not sure, it is so close and there is also personal preference.....
I wish there was a tether LR plug in for X system (I just found out about old/no longer supported plug in for H system)

 

[citizin]

Is there a spot to get or a way to make a Hasselblad "Camera Profile" for Lightroom?

 

[PSS]

Is there a spot to get or a way to make a Hasselblad "Camera Profile" for Lightroom?

it is built in, comes with LRC, the camera standard profile is the one...according to Hasselblad they worked with Adobe on this...
LR desktop has it as well, for whatever reason it does not get synced to the cloud, so LR mobile does not have this profile, must be some kind of bug because virtually any other profile can be synced

 

[PSS]

hmmm.....had some time to revisit a few files in Phocus.....definitely worth considering...colors are beautiful.....will work more with it...
still like LRC, will make some prints to compare as well.....

 

[davidrm]

Phocus is awful at highlight recovery, it turns sky cyan. Lightroom is much better. Also Phocus gradient tool is primitive, almost impossible to fine tune. But to my eyes Phocus gives better colour (X1D) and colour is the reason I bought this expensive camera. I also significantly prefer CaptureOne over Lightroom. So for me personally this is a big dilemma. I’d like to get away from Lightroom completely, but for some photos Phocus just can’t deliver. It’s so frustrating that I’m seriously considering selling my Hasselblad gear and (maybe) switching to Fuji.

 

[davidrm]

Phocus is awful at highlight recovery, it turns sky cyan. Lightroom is much better. Also Phocus gradient tool is primitive, almost impossible to fine tune. But to my eyes Phocus gives better colour (X1D) and colour is the reason I bought this expensive camera. I also significantly prefer CaptureOne over Lightroom. So for me personally this is a big dilemma. I’d like to get away from Lightroom completely, but for some photos Phocus just can’t deliver. It’s so frustrating that I’m seriously considering selling my Hasselblad gear and (maybe) switching to Fuji. Oh, but... Hasselblad colour.

 

[Godfrey]

Is there a spot to get or a way to make a Hasselblad "Camera Profile" for Lightroom?

You can always make your own camera profiles for use in LR or Camera Raw using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor or Xrite Color Checker Passport kit. I've done both occasionally, for specific niche requirements. But usually I just use what LR Classic provides for my cameras as it does well enough in the vast majority of cases.

G

 

[SrMphoto]

Phocus is awful at highlight recovery, it turns sky cyan. Lightroom is much better. Also Phocus gradient tool is primitive, almost impossible to fine tune. But to my eyes Phocus gives better colour (X1D) and colour is the reason I bought this expensive camera. I also significantly prefer CaptureOne over Lightroom. So for me personally this is a big dilemma. I’d like to get away from Lightroom completely, but for some photos Phocus just can’t deliver. It’s so frustrating that I’m seriously considering selling my Hasselblad gear and (maybe) switching to Fuji. Oh, but... Hasselblad colour.

AFAIK:
When the sky turns cyan in highlight recovery it is typically caused by blown highlights. When one channel is blown, Adobe is guessing the destroyed channel by using the other channels that are not blown. Adobe is doing a pretty good job. An even better solution is to expose without blowing highlights.

 

[davidrm]

"An even better solution is to expose without blowing highlights."

or just shoot JPEG....

I didn't spend 7+K to not maximise dynamic range.

 

[Godfrey]

It's better to bring up the black point and shadows than to recover blown highlights, in my opinion.
Regardless, proper exposure, no matter how much dynamic range you're trying to maximize, always gives the best results.

G

 

[SrMphoto]

"An even better solution is to expose without blowing highlights."

or just shoot JPEG....

I didn't spend 7+K to not maximise dynamic range.

I am not following.
You do not maximize dynamic range by blowing highlights. Any image with blown relevant highlights has not been exposed correctly.
P.S.: simplified, the dynamic range is measured from non-blown highlights to a certain amount of noise in shadows.

 

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi guys,
I just got myself a Hasselblad X1DII.
Everything is cool and dandy, but I am not super impressed by the native Phocus software.
I usually work with Capture One.
Do you develop your 3f files in Phocus or do you prefer Lightroom?

Best
Peter

Hi,

Lightroom is a DAM tool, with Phocus, I don't know.

Lightroom has a lot of content aware processing that can be good or bad, owning to taste. There are plenty of tools for generating color profiles for Lightroom. With Phocus you get what Hasselblad thinks is good.

If you have different gear, Lightroom works with all.

Personally, I never enjoyed Capture One. But I have been using Lightroom since public Beta 3, back in 2006, so I think I have some bias.

Best regards
Erik

 

[SrMphoto]

Hi,

Lightroom is a DAM tool, with Phocus, I don't know.

Lightroom has a lot of content aware processing that can be good or bad, owning to taste. There are plenty of tools for generating color profiles for Lightroom. With Phocus you get what Hasselblad thinks is good.

If you have different gear, Lightroom works with all.

Personally, I never enjoyed Capture One. But I have been using Lightroom since public Beta 3, back in 2006, so I think I have some bias.

Best regards
Erik

Lightroom is also a DAM tool.
The nice thing is that it can be combined very well with other tools like Phocus, DxO PhotoLab, Helicon Focus, Iridient Transformers, and even with Photoshop .

 

[sixby45]

The only thing I can add here being a long time user of both LR, and Phocus - is that I get consistently better, or should I say "easier" color results using Phocus, and pulling selects to edit in PS / Lightroom after. I can get there with adobe, but it takes longer, and occasionally the pixel mapping gets weird between Adobe and the older H3Dii, and H4 back files - so Phocus just works out of the box Tons of tools for sure, but since phocus is free go for it!

 

[Godfrey]

Hi,

Lightroom is a DAM tool, with Phocus, I don't know.

Lightroom has a lot of content aware processing that can be good or bad, owning to taste. There are plenty of tools for generating color profiles for Lightroom. With Phocus you get what Hasselblad thinks is good.

If you have different gear, Lightroom works with all.

Personally, I never enjoyed Capture One. But I have been using Lightroom since public Beta 3, back in 2006, so I think I have some bias.

Best regards
Erik

Exactly what "content aware processing" are you referring to? I've never seen anything that was content aware in LR, and the only supposedly content-aware processing I see in the LR Classic latest rev is the ability to quote-unquote "intelligently uprez" image files (which I use the quote-unquote notation for because I see NO difference between using it and doing the uprez myself manually).

Far as what I experience, LR is a straightforward and simple image processing tool. Every action in it, outside of using scripts and plug-ins, is easily shown to be pretty simple image processing value adjustments.

G

 

[tcdeveau]

Exactly what "content aware processing" are you referring to? I've never seen anything that was content aware in LR, and the only supposedly content-aware processing I see in the LR Classic latest rev is the ability to quote-unquote "intelligently uprez" image files (which I use the quote-unquote notation for because I see NO difference between using it and doing the uprez myself manually).

Far as what I experience, LR is a straightforward and simple image processing tool. Every action in it, outside of using scripts and plug-ins, is easily shown to be pretty simple image processing value adjustments.

G

I’m not aware of any in LR itself, but LR (at least classic) gives one the option within LR to right click on an image and send it to PS, where you can do content aware fills, and then it reimports the edited image back into Lightroom right next to the original in the library - which is a nice feature IMHO that Phocus obviously does not have.

I’ve always done initial adjustments in phocus and then used LR/PS to finish and organize (I’m heavily reliant on the DAM and “send to PS” functionality of LR).

At the end of the day, phocus is free…if anyone is considering the “phocus or Lightroom” question, just play around with both and see what workflow fits your tastes *shrug*

 

[Godfrey]

I’m not aware of any in LR itself, but LR (at least classic) gives one the option within LR to right click on an image and send it to PS, where you can do content aware fills, and then it reimports the edited image back into Lightroom right next to the original in the library - which is a nice feature IMHO that Phocus obviously does not have.

I’ve always done initial adjustments in phocus and then used LR/PS to finish and organize (I’m heavily reliant on the DAM and “send to PS” functionality of LR).

At the end of the day, phocus is free…if anyone is considering the “phocus or Lightroom” question, just play around with both and see what workflow fits your tastes *shrug*

That makes sense ... LR has always had the shortcut to open a file in PS, although I haven't used Photoshop since about PS 5 and I never used anything like the 'content aware fill' that later versions include. I do all my image rendering work in Lightroom, unless I use Phocus first to import 907x raw files and output them as TIFF files, and then finish them in Lightroom.

I have hundreds of thousands of raw image files from many many different cameras in my Lightroom catalogs and have been using it since 2006 or so; I'm never going to put all those files into Phocus, even if it could support them.

G

 

[spb]

I have hundreds of thousands of raw image files from many many different cameras in my Lightroom catalogs and have been using it since 2006 or so; I'm never going to put all those files into Phocus, even if it could support them.

G

That would be a major effort and definitely not worth even considering.

 

[davidrm]

I am not following.
You do not maximize dynamic range by blowing highlights. Any image with blown relevant highlights has not been exposed correctly.
P.S.: simplified, the dynamic range is measured from non-blown highlights to a certain amount of noise in shadows.

Thanks for the lesson. I've got a rough idea how this stuff works. The difference in clipping indication between the camera and Phocus is huge (at least 0.5EV). So to take full advantage of the range I try to ETTR, but with the X1D this is involves far more guesswork and crossed fingers than with far more modest cameras. So I end up constantly underexposing.

At least that's my experience.

 

[Godfrey]

Thanks for the lesson. I've got a rough idea how this stuff works. The difference in clipping indication between the camera and Phocus is huge (at least 0.5EV). So to take full advantage of the range I try to ETTR, but with the X1D this is involves far more guesswork and crossed fingers than with far more modest cameras. So I end up constantly underexposing.

At least that's my experience.

What I do, with every camera, is test the metering calibration.

- set up a tri-tone chart and the camera such that the chart fills the frame and divides it roughly into thirds
- set the camera to manual exposure
- use a hand-held incident meter to read the light falling on the chart and compare that to the camera's internal meter
(In the case of my camera, the readings match to within less than .3EV.)
- make an exposure at that setting, then look at the capture with the intensity histogram displayed.

The peaks of the histogram should divide the scale into thirds. If they're shifted left or right, adjust shutter time to compensate in .3EV steps until you get a perfect, evenly distributed histogram.

- move the image files into your image processing tool of choice (Phocus, Lightroom, whatever)
- check them with the tool's histogram

Use the EV offset from the image that the histogram fit best to adjust your settings when you're shooting. It will always be the same offset. It's simply how the meter is calibrated relative to the ISO and the engineer's expectation of proper exposure.

G