Considering purchasing an H3D.
To date, I have used Aperture for 95% of my work.
Apple's technical page lists aperture raw support for the H3D-31 and H3Dii-31 only.
Are folks happy using aperture for their H3D-31 workflow?
Looks like a lot of work for the H3D -22 or 39 if using aperture.
Is there an efficient workaround?
Finally, any comparisons between aperture and phocus results?
Thanks.
I have an H3DII-31 and was also using Aperture for 95% of my work flow.
Unfortunately, as things stand, I could not recommend using Aperture with shots from the camera. My understanding is that Aperture's architecture is not really set up to deal with such big files. Processing the raw files in Aperture is OK, but I much prefer the colour rendition from Phocus. Processing the files in Phocus first and loading them into Aperture as 16 bit TIFFs would be a valid workflow, but it creates huge 180 MB intermediate files and for me at least causes Aperture to crash frequently.
Phocus gives lovely image quality, but at present does not have the DAM or retouch/clone facilities of Aperture, which makes it mandatory for me to run my files through something else after Phocus. While I really MUCH prefer Aperture, I've had to switch to Lightroom for stability. Sadly Lightroom does not handle Hasselblad files at all well, not even being able to display the FFF versions (which are the ones with metadata and adjustments stored in them: the 3FR versions that come straight off the camera do not contain that information).
The good news is that Hasselblad do seem to be actively developing Phocus. Version 2 is due out soon and the guys who have been beta testing say it has nice new features, but it doesn't sound like a replacement for Aperture just yet.
The bad news is that no-one knows whether Apple are developing Aperture. If version 3 comes out fairly promptly and has "industrial strength" improvements to large file handling, I'll switch back to it cheerful for DAM and retouch, although I'll probably stick with Phocus for first pass image prep because I just like the colour rendition much better.
Here are four shots processed from FFF raw files with Phocus and again in Aperture. Aperture gave me the spinning beach ball of death twice (on only four shots!). In Phocus I applied my standard S-shape tone curve (hooray! proper tone curves! NEVER understood why Aperture doesn't have them).
In Aperture, I played with the sliders to give me something vaguely approximating my standard s-shaped curve settings: reduced the exposure a fair bit, upped the contrast, dialled in some recovery to stop the highlights burning out, tweaked the black level, added a little definition. (Basically my fairly standard set of tweaks to every shot as a first approximation, in both Aperture and Phocus).
These aren't final-quality everything done shots - just quick and dirty "first goes" at the tone curve with no other retouching, to give an impression how shots come out. (For example I really should have pulled up the shadows a bit on the first Phocus shot...)
I much prefer Phocus' renditions, especially of the skin tones, but see what you think. Aperture's default rendition has a lot less contrast and a lot more shadow detail and I would describe it as looking a bit "HDR-like". Phocus' renditions seem more saturated, more punchy, and generally more visually arresting with default settings. There is of course no right and wrong, but I find the Phocus rendition easier to get to where I want it without having unfortunate things start happening to the skin tones. I'm sure I could get the Aperture results closer to the Phocus ones with more than the 60 seconds or so of playing around I did (and vice versa if you prefer a much more HDR-like low contrast look, I'm sure Phocus will oblige. It'll even process in reproduction mode which is basically linear without a cooked-in gamma).
A really big plus is that these "looks" can be predefined in Phocus and applied right at the point you first capture from card or camera to Phocus. So you can have something which looks much closer to the final product immediately, but it is all non-destructively applied to the raw file of course so you can change your mind completely later.
I'm very happy with my H3DII-31. I also love the rendition from Phocus, cannot fault the image quality and the features it does have, it implements well. Sadly it is not yet a complete replacement for Aperture, nor does Aperture really behave very well with Hasselblad files Fingers crossed for Aperture 3, to save me from the dreaded Lightroom...
Cheers, Hywel Phillips
First batch of shots is Phocus, second batch is Aperture: