Your familiarity, skill, and experience with a given image processing system will ultimately be the bottom line in the quality and satisfaction you get out of your photos, not which image processing system you choose. Same goes for ON1 and a few others that I've tried.
For me, that's more important than what it does on its defaults because, by and large, I can get what I want out of any raw conversion/image editing tools I've tried with an appropriate amount of learning and use effort. I've tried it several times, through various revisions, and I just don't like the workflow design notions it's built on at all. I find that it does a slightly better job, on the defaults, than LR does but that with a little tweak or two I can achieve the same thing.Ĭ1 and I don't get along. The workflow is pretty easy to understand and it produces excellent, satisfying results on the default settings for the CFVII 50c raw files, presuming I used the right exposure settings and got the focus on the mark.
I'm still learning how to get what I want out of Phocus, but I don't find it either particularly difficult or much better or worse than Lightroom.
That said, I've got Phocus and Phocus Mobile 2 now on both my Mac and my iPad Pro 11". I've been using Lightroom since 2006 so I have a fairly robust skill set with it. YM will almost certainly V but it works for me!
Of course, it would be reasonable to ask why go to all this trouble to process an X1D file in C1 and all I can say is that I find the whole experience more rewarding.
So I’m reasonably comfortable that I can use my preferred software without feeling that I’m missing something. The outcome was that, after making these adjustments, all TIFFs were good, and near identical. With C1 (dng neutral profile) it was a bit duller and turning up the saturation (about +20) did the job in giving it the same look as the Phocus image. The LR file was noticeably softer (with the standard profile) but otherwise similar. I had included a grey card in the photos - which was unusually good thinking for me! However, in trying to make all three TIFFs look the same, I went back to the RAW file and made adjustments to the LR & C1 images, including getting the WB to look the same. They were noticeably different - with (in my judgement) Phocus being the most accurate and appealing. I processed several X1D image files to TIFFs and compared them. So, whilst I can’t claim to have done it thoroughly or scientifically, I made a rough comparison between Phocus and the alternatives that I normally use. Putting aside the obvious benefit of lens profiles in Phocus, I was rather concerned that I was missing something by not using It for the X1D files. However, since acquiring a Phase back 6 years ago, I have used Capture One and found it so good to use that my preferred route for X1D files is to convert them to dng in LR and do the Exif edit “fudge” before importing to C1. It worked just fine but somehow I never quite got to grips with it and defaulted to LR & PS for other images from whatever digital camera I had at the time. I’ve used Phocus on and off for at least 10 years, maybe more, when it was necessary to process 3FR files that came out of my Flextight scanner. Interesting discussion as I’ve been through this dilemma since I acquired an X1D to use alongside a Phase IQ back.