Lightroom and Phocus for .3fr fles

[kuau]

I am just getting into my new / used H3D39 and my 3 lenses, 28, 50-110, and 150mm lenses.
How does lightroom LR3 compare with Phocus for raw conversions?

Thanks
Steven

[John R Smith]

Well

This is a fairly big subject, and might generate a bit of heat from adherents of both pieces of software. The largest and most apparent difference is that Phocus does not work directly on 3FR files at all, but first of all converts them to another Hasselblad raw format, FFF. Which Lightroom does not, and Lightroom cannot read FFF files at all. When the 3FR files are imported into Phocus as FFF, Phocus does some stuff to them. As far as I can see (and the process is not documented clearly), Phocus does some noise reduction, a lot of colour balance correction, and even some CA removal before you make any edits whatsoever. Obviously Lightroom does none of this. This Phocus pre-production, if you like, is actually pretty good and it produces very nice, smooth-looking TIFFs. The other trick Phocus can do which Lightroom cannot, is of course lens correction. Phocus can apply lens corrections for all the Hasselblad H-series lenses and a lot of the old Zeiss glass too.

However, and it is a big however, Lightroom as a parametric editing tool is streets ahead of Phocus. It has gradients, burn and dodge, spot removal, far more sophisticated B/W conversion, printing templates, and is just a much better user interface in most respects. The bottom line is that in many cases you can do all your image editing in Lightroom, from capture to print. Using Phocus, you will always need a pixel editor to complete the job. Still, Phocus is free for download, so you may as well have a copy on your hard drive.

John

[Dustbak]

I use Lightroom only as a DAM program for my 3FR files. When I need to process my Hasselblad files I always revert to Phocus. It simply has the best output. Why buying top of the line stuff when you do not intend to get every single bit of quality out of it?

[John R Smith]

I use Lightroom only as a DAM program for my 3FR files. When I need to process my Hasselblad files I always revert to Phocus. It simply has the best output. Why buying top of the line stuff when you do not intend to get every single bit of quality out of it?

Yes, this may be true. My experience is limited to B/W final output only. It is perfectly possible that Phocus may well produce better colour TIFFs with less effort than it would take in Lightroom, I just have no experience of this aspect. As a pure RAW converter, Phocus seems to be very good.

John

[kuau]

I use Lightroom only as a DAM program for my 3FR files. When I need to process my Hasselblad files I always revert to Phocus. It simply has the best output. Why buying top of the line stuff when you do not intend to get every single bit of quality out of it?

Since I am coming from using Capture NX2 from nikon, which I always felt gave better results from my D3x files then LR, I have played with Phocus and I like it but.... It is very basic and yes I would have to go into PS CS4 for final adjustments, I always liked Nik software color efex which i have for capture nx, now I would have to get this for PS or LR I guess

Overall though I would agree with your statement above, I want to get every bit of quality out of my H3d39

Steven

[John.Williams]

John Smith's question is spot on; the 3FR and 3F file relationship: Lightroom and Phocus read 3FR - or when shooting tethered and after import - the 3F file.

What is the 3FR? = A compressed (lossless) 3F file, comes from shooting to CF card (or ImageBank.)

So when you have a 3FR, it is a 3F file that has not been imported yet - in either Lightroom, Aperture, or Phocus.

After importing, the 3FR is developed using any of these RAW developers into the digital asset manager library (or the uncompressed, 3F file in a folder for Phocus.)

What does Phocus do then? Lens corrections (optical, color, vignetting) derived from the lens meta-data at capture, capture color temp, and conversion from Hasselblad RGB (big - have a look) into the RGB working space of your choice (default is AdobeRGB.) Also will add your copyright info automatically. And various processing recipes you have used. Some of these tools are in Lightroom and Aperture used to achieve similar results. Phocus does a lot more if you choose, but this is the specific answer to the question posed above.

...of course each application uses different algorithms to develop the RAW data (de-mosaicing) and the differing results are understood...

One would expect Phocus to provide the best result for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the specialty experience obtained and crafted when focused on a single sensor family (now two) . Adobe and Apple have plenty to do in order to meet the high expectations of a very large user base, and I am appreciative that Hasselblad RAW files can be read by these two major imaging applications; does not sound like a "closed-system" to me, hmmm?

The 3F file is based on TIFF/EP. Yep, our good old buddy TIFF. This publicly published file format contains the TIFF header information and the actual pixel data. In the header you will find "public" and "private" tags. Hasselblad puts image information into the private tag area, hence the 3F designation. This means software that can read TIFF/EP can read 3F files, however many programs (Photo Mechanic, etc.) extract the embedded JPEG and display that instead of the larger file (the embedded JPEG has the characteristics of the developed RAW file, most notable is color temp.)

John