Switching from Capture One to Phocus for the X1D?

[NickT]

I have started to play with Phocus a bit on my D810 files and I like the conversions. The colors are nice and the rendering of details is very natural with default settings.

Phocus uses the Apple renderings for 3rd party files.

Obviously I am sure it does an even better job on the Hassy files for which it was designed.

Yes I would say that was the case

What I didn't like:
- slow performance when browsing folders with many images

This is not an issue I have come across, how many images? Local drive?

- lack of some key features I often use in my C1 Pro workflow such as: vertical corrections, luminance curve to mention the 2 most obvious ones.

There are new features coming

- I wasn't able to use some of the features such as highlight recovery, but I guess those only work on Hassy files

Yes Hasselblad files only, it needs a bit of work though, Adobe's implementation is better.

I am looking forward to version 3.1. I feel that there is sound code base here that must be enriched in the coming releases. One thing is sure, Phocus is far from being as terrible as I had heard.

Cheers,
Bernard

I agree!

[scyth]

Phocus uses the Apple renderings for 3rd party files.

I'd say Phocus uses Apple supplied raw formats decoding (for non H cameras) and probably simple "camera profiles" (just like dcraw code has simple matrix color transforms inside), but you can create and use your own profiles... but the raw converter pipeline past the decoding is the same for H and non H cameras... just my understanding

[E.J. Peiker]

I guess that explains why the Windows version only supports Hasselblads while the Mac version supports a bunch of cameras.  Seems like an odd development choice.

[BernardLanguillier]

This is not an issue I have come across, how many images? Local drive?

It was a Thunderbolt Raid 6 drive (Promise) with several hundreds of .nef file per directory connected to a 2013 MAc Pro with 8 cores, 128GB Ram and 2xD700 GPU. It is starting to be a bit dated, but should be fast enough.

The disk is a fast set up also with read speed around 500 MB/s.

Cheers,
Bernard

[NickT]

Hi Bernard
I just tried with a folder of NEFs, 500 or so on a USB3 RAID 5 box and the performance seemed fine. There was a slight (maybe 1/3 sec) pause before each thumbnail was drawn with corrections applied, maybe that's what you are seeing? I use Lightroom for all my NEFs so no expert.
HTH

[scyth]

I guess that explains why the Windows version only supports Hasselblads while the Mac version supports a bunch of cameras.  Seems like an odd development choice.

why odd - consider that H was just giving a free converter to OSX users with a minimal labor investment, because they naturally do not target non H cameras at all ...

[BernardLanguillier]

Hi Bernard
I just tried with a folder of NEFs, 500 or so on a USB3 RAID 5 box and the performance seemed fine. There was a slight (maybe 1/3 sec) pause before each thumbnail was drawn with corrections applied, maybe that's what you are seeing? I use Lightroom for all my NEFs so no expert.
HTH

Thanks Nick,

I'll give it another try.

Cheers,
Bernard

[E.J. Peiker]

why odd - consider that H was just giving a free converter to OSX users with a minimal labor investment, because they naturally do not target non H cameras at all ...

I just thought it was odd to make a RAW converter that services many different brands of cameras on the Mac platform and the same piece of software only services one brand of camera on the Windows platform.  But now I know why they do since they are licensing Apple IP and yes, I still think it's a strange choice even though I understand the minimal labor investment part that you mention.  I own both platforms by the way so this isn't intended as anything other than an aha moment for me.

[eronald]

I just thought it was odd to make a RAW converter that services many different brands of cameras on the Mac platform and the same piece of software only services one brand of camera on the Windows platform.  But now I know why they do since they are licensing Apple IP and yes, I still think it's a strange choice even though I understand the minimal labor investment part that you mention.  I own both platforms by the way so this isn't intended as anything other than an aha moment for me.

They aren't licensing Apple Ip, AFAIK, they are just calling the Apple built-in APIs on the Mac platform.

Apple had a prosumer converter - Aperture, they have a comprehensive set of color correction utilities and a profile engine -Colorsync- which is maintained and extended year by year together with the file ingestion tools so I consider using Apple's tools  a smart way for a tiny company to leverage their time. P1 used to belong in part to Microsoft, so I assume with them it went the other way round, they may have helped Microsoft develop their Raw file readers.

Edmund

[DrakeJ]

I have just invested in a MF-system (Phase) and did an extensive compare with H and P1 over several weekends.

The real downside with H is Phocus. The highlight recovery slider is useless and renders the image completely flat (reported this to a H-representative at a demo of H6D-100c and showed him its uselessness ). The new adjustments layers have extremely limited options (can't change shadows/highlights for instance). Phocus feels dated and is rather slow.

Considering what H has released so far with the H6D and the X1D I'm sure they're putting a lot of resources into Phocus and I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

However, it's fully Lightroom compatible (which is excellent), but colour rendering is not quite the same between the two software. If you do landscape this could perhaps be a non-issue, but doing portraits I'm rather peculiar about skin tones.

Hope this helps!

[hubell]

The real downside with H is Phocus. The highlight recovery slider is useless and renders the image completely flat (reported this to a H-representative at a demo of H6D-100c and showed him its uselessness ). The new adjustments layers have extremely limited options (can't change shadows/highlights for instance). Phocus feels dated and is rather slow.

Considering what H has released so far with the H6D and the X1D I'm sure they're putting a lot of resources into Phocus and I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

However, it's fully Lightroom compatible (which is excellent), but colour rendering is not quite the same between the two software. If you do landscape this could perhaps be a non-issue, but doing portraits I'm rather peculiar about skin tones.

Hope this helps!

I agree about the Highlight and Shadow Tools in Phocus compared to LR and C1. They are pretty much useless in Phocus. With the dynamic range of the newer Sony sensors, these tools have become a key part of post processing. I trust that Hasselblad is aware of this.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

One suggestion may be that Hasselblad and Phase one could/should make good DCP profiles available for their cameras.

Best regards
Erik

I have just invested in a MF-system (Phase) and did an extensive compare with H and P1 over several weekends.

The real downside with H is Phocus. The highlight recovery slider is useless and renders the image completely flat (reported this to a H-representative at a demo of H6D-100c and showed him its uselessness ). The new adjustments layers have extremely limited options (can't change shadows/highlights for instance). Phocus feels dated and is rather slow.

Considering what H has released so far with the H6D and the X1D I'm sure they're putting a lot of resources into Phocus and I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

However, it's fully Lightroom compatible (which is excellent), but colour rendering is not quite the same between the two software. If you do landscape this could perhaps be a non-issue, but doing portraits I'm rather peculiar about skin tones.

Hope this helps!

[torger]

With the new CMOS sensors using the mative converter is less important than before in terms of image quality, as there's much less calibration data and noise reduction trickery. Using native now is basically only about the color profiles. Oh well, lens corrections probably which may be lacking in third party converters.

The importance of profiles should not be under-estimated though, but they're subjective designs which you may or may not like. I prefer Hassy color over Phase One (which is too subjective/unrealistic to be ideal for me), but both do very well-designed profiles in that someone has really put effort in them to get a certain look. Adobe mixes high with low, mostly low historically but maybe it's better now.

I have chosen to use custom profiles to avoid lockin to a native converter, plus I don't want too much subjectivity in the colors as a starting point. I was not pleased with xrite etc so I made DCamProf. With own profiles I have no issue using LR, although RawTherapee is my weapon of choice. C1 locks out competitors so I don't like to lock myself in to that tool, although it's certainly well made.

You can through hacks make a Hassy DNG that C1 accepts, like some did with the Pentax 645z, but it's messy and can stop working when C1 is upgraded, so you need to ditch C1 if you get a Hassy.

[BernardLanguillier]

so you need to ditch C1 if you get a Hassy.

That would/will be painful, but there is just too much price difference for P1 to make sense in my book.

Cheers,
Bernard

[BobShaw]

so you need to ditch C1 if you get a Hassy.

Incorrect, as has been covered in one of the three places this same post appears. You can't browse FFF files but if you have a Mac you can just browse in the finder or any other programme except C1. I use Aperture. The heroes just process in Phocus or Photoshop or Lightroom and save a TIFF if you want C1.
If you want the best camera then get the Hassy. You never hear of people not buying a Canon because they don't like DPP.

I hope that one day Phocus does have a DAM built in but at this stage it doesn't. It is a raw converter, tether capture tool and colour reproduction tool.
C1 and Lightroom are a jack of all trades.

[torger]

Have you ever heard Phase One explain their process for profiling a camera?  I have from several Phase One employees independently and the amount of work that they put into every camera's profiles is extraordinary and far exceeds what Adobe does.It's one of the reasons why they often don't have C1 ready for new cameras the day they start shipping as they procure actual production cameras and then profile them using a test suite that includes about 700 actual photos to zero in on their profiles.

This sounds a bit strange, you can't just have 700 photos laying around and profile any camera against that, you need to shoot those 700 scenes with the new camera then. Or you measure the camera's SSFs and you have 700 photos captured with a full spectrum camera and render virtual raws from that which is theoretically possible (that feature exists in DCamProf by the way) but I doubt they do that. Or maybe they just shoot prints of 700 photos in a viewing booth, I guess that would sort of work but it's not true to the spectrum so it seems to me to be a poorer method than simply shooting a smaller number of real scenes plus some fixed reference test target scenes.

It's also the case that a camera profile is global and static, you will need to make tradeoffs. You can't make a profile that's best for all types of subjects, so to make it better for skin you may need to make it worse for landscape. So testing it on 700 photos doesn't mean that you can make it perform at the same excellent level on all those 700 (unless it's 700 photos of the same subject), but you need to pick and choose what you think is more important and what is less.

I also assume that they put a lot more manual tuning effort into say a IQ3 100MP profile than say a Canon 1DX profile.

Finally it's a lot of subjectivity involved in these profiles, and if your personal taste happen to not match the profile designer's it doesn't matter how much time that has been spent with the profile. I find this true with Phase One's look, sure the profiles are extremely well-made and robust, but I just don't like the yellow cast (which is there by design as Phase One likes that look) so to me a custom profile made using simpler methods than they use suits me better. Many like Phase One's look though obviously, but my point is that camera color is not a linear scale from bad to great, there's a lot of subjectivity and tradeoffs involved which means that the complexity of the design method does not really say that much of how well the profile will work out for a particular user.

[E.J. Peiker]

All I can tell you torger, is that I think Phase 1 knows what they are talking about.  Of course they do not share details of exactly what all those shots are or how they are done. Comparing their profiles versus Adobes for any of the cameras I shoot with including the Nikon D810, Nikon D7200, Sony a7R Mark II, Sony a 7R, Sony a6000, Sony a6300, Phase 1 IQ 160, Phase 1 IQ 260, phase 1 IQ280, phase 1 IQ3–100, the capture one profiles for each and every one, to my eyes is superior to any of the profile choices from Adobe for any of those cameras, so implying that they don't take great care in creating those profiles just does not ring true to me.  Certainly I agree that they give extraordinary care to creating their own IQ profiles, but I do not believe that the profiles for other cameras that are supported are done Willy Nilly as would be the implication in some of the previous statements.

I do realize that all of this is very subjective though  and tastes vary.

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi E. J.,

You could of course try Anders Torger's profile instead of Adobe's and see if you like it better. I know he has a couple of profiles for the A7rII for download.

Best regards
Erik

All I can tell you torger, is that I think Phase 1 knows what they are talking about.  Of course they do not share details of exactly what all those shots are or how they are done. Comparing their profiles versus Adobes for any of the cameras I shoot with including the Nikon D810, Nikon D7200, Sony a7R Mark II, Sony a 7R, Sony a6000, Sony a6300, Phase 1 IQ 160, Phase 1 IQ 260, phase 1 IQ280, phase 1 IQ3–100, the capture one profiles for each and every one, to my eyes is superior to any of the profile choices from Adobe for any of those cameras, so implying that they don't take great care in creating those profiles just does not ring true to me.  Certainly I agree that they give extraordinary care to creating their own IQ profiles, but I do not believe that the profiles for other cameras that are supported are done Willy Nilly as would be the implication in some of the previous statements.

I do realize that all of this is very subjective though  and tastes vary.

[tcdeveau]

It was a Thunderbolt Raid 6 drive (Promise) with several hundreds of .nef file per directory connected to a 2013 MAc Pro with 8 cores, 128GB Ram and 2xD700 GPU. It is starting to be a bit dated, but should be fast enough.

The disk is a fast set up also with read speed around 500 MB/s.

Cheers,
Bernard

I've also been experiencing slow performance lately in Phocus with a similar setup.  I'm using Phocus 3, 2013 Mac Pro (6-core, 64GB RAM, 2xD700 GPU), Promise 2 RAID 5 (~500mb/s read/write) over thunderbolt 2.  Also a little dated but should be fast enough to handle my H4D-40 files.  Doing things like zooming in/out and panning around while zoomed seem to take a lot longer than it did with previous versions of Phocus, and sometimes it feels like it takes a second or two for changes to appear on the photo after slider manipulation.  Maybe there's more optimization that needs to be done with Phocus 3?  It could be an issue with my system too I suppose but I don't have any speed issues with LR.  My 2012 retina MacBook Pro also used to handle the Hassy files just fine, I haven't tried it with Phocus 3 yet but I suppose I could to compare.  FWIW my workflow is also to use Phocus as a RAW converter and then export to LR. 

[torger]

All I can tell you torger, is that I think Phase 1 knows what they are talking about.  Of course they do not share details of exactly what all those shots are or how they are done. Comparing their profiles versus Adobes for any of the cameras I shoot with including the Nikon D810, Nikon D7200, Sony a7R Mark II, Sony a 7R, Sony a6000, Sony a6300, Phase 1 IQ 160, Phase 1 IQ 260, phase 1 IQ280, phase 1 IQ3–100, the capture one profiles for each and every one, to my eyes is superior to any of the profile choices from Adobe for any of those cameras, so implying that they don't take great care in creating those profiles just does not ring true to me.  Certainly I agree that they give extraordinary care to creating their own IQ profiles, but I do not believe that the profiles for other cameras that are supported are done Willy Nilly as would be the implication in some of the previous statements.

I do realize that all of this is very subjective though  and tastes vary.

Yes they do them well, I agree. I could be largely automated though for the common cameras, while the hand-tune in detail for their medium format cameras. Automated doesn't necessarily mean that it would be bad. The reason Adobe's profiles isn't that good to many of us is not that they're automated but that they've made some design choices in terms of look that doesn't yield the best results. For example they have their special tone curve a HSL-hue-constant RGB curve that gives highs a special look. You can however make a perceptual model of how a curve should be applied and get a different (and to me better) result which still makes it quick and easy to make a profile but with a better result.

Regardless how they do it the situation is that many do think that C1 gives superior color compared to LR (as that's basically what people compare to, not the manufacturer's own quirky converters which usually have very good color too), and I think it's a real advantage for Phase One, so I fully understand why they shut out the competing MFD products, C1 is a pretty strong selling point for spending the huge premium that a Phase One system is. If I were them I'd consider shutting out high res 135 cameras too, but I guess to many of their MFD customers also have a high res 135.

To say something about Phocus is that they also have very well-designed color profiles and their own multi-illuminant proprietary format (plus ICC for custom) for their Hassy cameras, the third-party cameras doesn't have any special profiles though AFAIK, just standard stuff coming with the OSX APIs. Personally I prefer Hasselblad's color over Phase One's, but to get that color you need to run Phocus... as their profile format is multi-illuminant and entirely different from DNG profiles it's probably not easily ported to LR, but if they tried their best I think the result would still be really good. AFAIK the colors of Hassy cameras in LR is far from being as good, but I haven't personally made a comparison (despite that I can I have a H4D-50, just haven't been curious enough about it...). I use a custom DNG profile myself for my Hasselblad, so I don't use Phocus, not so much because I don't like it but because I've always used RawTherapee both for my Leaf back and now my Hasselblad.

Phocus is fine if you have a "tradititional" shooting style where you don't need to apply that much post-processing, but is a bit frustrating otherwise.