u/Big_Rip4015

So as a reminder, I posted on April 9th about the pretty egregious color regression bug, which in and of itself was probably enough reason to not be using it and sticking with 4.1.1. Link down below for those who did not see it.

Then in the last 5 days I've spotted two complaints about 4.1.2 not adhering to pixel size limits set in custom export profiles. I did some digging and yup, you guessed it, Phocus 4.1.2 seems to be fixated on only exporting images at 7000x5250 pixels, regardless of what you put in the relevant fields. It just flat out ignores it. Even a JPEG export using the canned JPG profile resizes a full-size image down to 7000x5250.

Wrote up a formal bug report and sent it to HB support with all the usual evidence they ask for, and then on a hunch decided a few hours later to test other export formats. Yup. Same behavior with TIFF and HEIF. So the file size path in the export code is just being ignored.

At this point I'd strongly recommend just steering clear of 4.1.2.

https://blog.tonalphoto.com/phocus-4-1-2-color-preview-regression/

If you are shooting just RAW, the X2D II captures the full dynamic range in every frame, and Phocus can render that data as HDR after the fact. You only need RAW+JPG or RAW+HEIF if you want the camera itself to embed an HDR JPEG or HEIF at capture time.

https://blog.tonalphoto.com/x2d-ii-hdr-raw-jpg-capture-mode/

For some reason I’ve had several Pep Ventosa style shots pop up in my feed recently and figured I’d give it a go myself. Started in the more controlled environment of my mini studio with this, since a huge part of this technique is post processing, and I wanted to practice on something with fewer variables before attempting the more ambitious “tree in the round” type shoot outside.

Didn’t come out too badly I don’t think. 15 image composite.

One of the (many) annoying things about Phocus 4.x for Mac as I'm sure many of you have discovered, is that if you apply one of those presets from "Adjustments" dropdown, once you've saved it, there's no way to tell what preset you applied, as the text simply changes to "Edited <date>".

My initial take a few months ago was that this was simply undiscoverable after the image had been saved. Turns out I didn't dig deeply enough into the .phos sidecar files.

tl;dr, it is saved to the .phos. But not to exifdata of exports.

https://blog.tonalphoto.com/what-phocus-writes-to-phos-hncs-presets/

If you've ever tried to customize your Phocus workspace, inter-alia adding tools to the adjust tab, you may have noticed that those changes don't persist over too many app restarts. This was driving me bonkers because the default number of tools in the adjust tab, for example meant I couldn't have 3 panes open at the same time. The top one would inevitably collapse.

I spent weeks chasing a "bug" in Phocus where my hidden tool panels and rearranged windows would revert, seemingly at random. Filed it as a bug, sent plist diffs to HB engineering, the whole thing. Months of back-and-forth. Much to my chagrin, it turns out it was never a bug. One of those Phocus UI anti-patterns.

Phocus's six built-in layouts (Standard, Browse, Viewer, Thumbnails Only, Light Mode, Standard Mode) are read-only templates. Anything you customise while one of them is active is session-only. Tool visibility, window arrangement, toolbar config: all of it gets sometimes gets discarded when Phocus restarts because the built-in layout has no slot to write your changes into. Bizarrely though I couldn't find a pattern I could nail down. Sometimes my changes persisted across several app restarts over several days. Sometimes they reset on a single restart.

Turns out the fix is to create a custom layout. Layouts toolbar button, then Edit, click +, name it, check Views and Tool layout, hit "Update From Current," OK. Now your customisations stick whenever you switch to that layout. Why they couldn't just build this mechanism into the UI so that when one made changes to a canned layout it prompted to save the changes, they alone will know.

The Layouts editor also exposes one option that surprised me: you can save adjustment values as part of a layout. So you can build a "zero everything" layout you toggle to for starting fresh on each image. Not what I'd want most of the time, but a real use case.

Anyway, full post is here: https://blog.tonalphoto.com/phocus-custom-layouts-fix-workspace-resetting/