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Author Topic: Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D  (Read 6629 times)

TheSmokingCamera

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« on: November 20, 2009, 12:13:35 am »

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.
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Hywel

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #1 on: November 20, 2009, 04:05:29 pm »

Quote from: TheSmokingCamera
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:
« Last Edit: November 20, 2009, 04:24:22 pm by Hywel »
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TheSmokingCamera

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #2 on: November 20, 2009, 08:26:29 pm »

Thank you so much Hywell for such a detailed and thorough response.
The information you provided is more valuable than a week's worth of searching on the internet.
You not only answered the questions I asked, you answered questions that I needed to ask.
I will study your intelligent response and your superb images again and again.
Thanks again.
« Last Edit: November 20, 2009, 08:28:50 pm by TheSmokingCamera »
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rovanpera

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #3 on: November 27, 2009, 04:06:29 am »

You can convert the fff-files to dng with Phocus, and bring those to Lightroom, but you will lose the lens corrections Phocus can apply...

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Phil G

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2009, 11:34:16 am »

Quote from: TheSmokingCamera
Thank you so much Hywell for such a detailed and thorough response.
The information you provided is more valuable than a week's worth of searching on the internet.
You not only answered the questions I asked, you answered questions that I needed to ask.
I will study your intelligent response and your superb images again and again.
Thanks again.

I have H3D39 and use Aperture2 for Canon, Sony and HBlad files
 
Workflow for HBlad
convert to .fff in Phocus and Archive on HDD
Import into Aperture as Referenced files.

Aperture is ok for most of the work especially the DAM functionality and all images irrespective of format are contained within Apertures DAM

if you need to tweak an image to improve moiré say then use Phocus and save as a tiff

Which you can import into Aperture again as a referenced file

I have called Photoshop as the image editor from within Aperture for comps and produced 600MB+ files and on one occasion  have received a 2GB tiff warning but aperture has coped
NB the files are stored as referenced files not in the Aperture library

I use SATA 7200 32MB HDDs striped pair for library and scratchpad/working space and singletons for Archive and Backup
I use a Mac Pro with  512MB graphics card  

Phil
« Last Edit: November 30, 2009, 11:36:39 am by Phil G »
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Hywel

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #5 on: November 30, 2009, 01:31:26 pm »

That's interesting- I wonder why my installation of Aperture suffers so much with large files? (It isn't just the Hasselblad files, it is a bit unstable with 5D Mk2 RAW files too). Maybe I am doing something different in my workflow. I'd dearly love to stick to Aperture but I've been looking at LR3 beta because Aperture struggles so much with the files.

Maybe I should try a clean install. I'm also on a MacPro, 512 MB graphics card, 8 GB memory, hardware RAID 7200 SATA drives with an Apple RAID card. On Snow Leopard, but it was unstable under Leopard as well.

I store everything as a referenced file, too.

Do you batch process files? That is the point where the instability is most marked for me.

  Cheers, Hywel.



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Arminw

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Questions about Aperture, Phocus and H3D
« Reply #6 on: December 08, 2009, 10:23:56 am »

I also have problems with Aperture when importing reverenced 16bid tiff files processed from my H3DII 50. It's been a nightmare to make Aperture work reliably with such huge files. I hope Apple can sort that out in the next update (when it comes out ) or I might have to switch as well like so many others to LR.
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