Hasselblad’s Phocus
In this tutorial Peter explains how he uses Hasselblad’s software Phocus, which is his favourite program to do raw converts and at least 90% of his editing is done in raw before taking the image into Photoshop to do a small amount of clean up. Phocus is a free Hasselblad program that you can download here and will work with any camera on a Mac, but if you don’t havea Hasselblad you cannot tether and some sliders will be unavailable.
7 comments on “Hasselblad’s Phocus”
Great JOB ! V1 and V2 I never know before…
Thanks, this is really useful. I’m currently putting RAF files into it from a GFX
Thanks James. You might find it a little slow and clunky but it is a really great raw converter
Hi, thanks so much for this. I know you retouch in Photoshop but I am so used to my workflow in Lightroom, specifically with a touch pencil on an iPad Pro that I don’t want to miss it. I plan to switch from Canon to Hasselblad, probably X2D and the biggest question for me is: once i edit the raw in Phocus and adjust colors, etc., and then export the file to do retouching (removing pimples mainly) into Lightroom – will LR change the color science of the Hasselblad file? It’s such an important question and since I don’t have a Hasselblad yet, I can’t test this. All I know is that when I open a Canon file in Capture One, it looks completely different (better skin tones) than in LR. I know Hasselblad has Phocus for iPad too, but does Phocus even offer retouching features? Like cloning erasing… etc. I would appreciate a reply. Maybe i should just buy a used H4D-40 for the beginning… BTW what would you do, H4D or X series? I pretty much shoot only portrait…
Hi Alexander, I’m really not impressed with the X2, you should see if you can hire or borrow one and play around with it before buying it. Lightroom used to change the files but I thought they had fixed this problem now, try using it on a fresh Canon file but don’t let it change it to a DNG, keep it as a raw. Phocus doesn’t offer retouching features, just like Capture One. The old Hasselblads are a bit more like film cameras so I’m not sure if that would suit how you work, but with the X series I’d recommend the X1Dii over the X2D.
I appreciate your fast reply! I am so confused by your opinion as you seem to be the only one to say that about x1dii vs x2d. Can you explain exactly what it is that makes you favor the x1dII over x2d?
the upcoming xcd90mm 2,5 lens with 4000 sync speed is one of the main points of wanting the X2D as I do plan on using it outside the studio with flash and it wont work on x1d. IBIS is another major reason. I don’t need the 100megapixels but it’s not bad to have it for a quarter of the price of an H6. However, the main reason for considering hasselblad, at least to me, is simply the color science and something tells me that it’s not the IBIS and 1TB SSD drive in the x2D that you don’t like, it gotta be something in the output of the final image that you dislike…or is something else?
No worries. The main thing I didn’t like was the over-sharpened images and the extremely slow auto-focusing, but there was so much about it I didn’t like. Cameras come down to everyones personal choice, and it sounds like the x2d might be the camera that best suits your needs, it just doesn’t suit my needs is all.