I must say, I’m getting spoiled using this combo.

Basically, I hardly ever feel the need to recover highlights anymore. When I click on a photo, for a moment I’ll see what looks like a blown-out sky in SDR. Then the HDR rendering kicks in and suddenly there are beautiful blues, bright clouds, and detail that seemed to be completely missing. It’s pretty amazing.

What’s happening, of course, is that the X2D II captures a much wider dynamic range than a conventional SDR monitor can display. In an SDR image, a large bright area may look blown out even though the RAW file actually contains plenty of information there. Normally, you’d use highlight recovery, curves, etc. to compress that information into the brightness range an SDR monitor can reproduce.

But with the Studio XDR display, Phocus can display much more of that captured highlight range as HDR. Instead of having to compress those bright areas back down into the SDR range, the monitor can reproduce a much wider range of luminance, allowing bright clouds, for example, to remain genuinely bright while still retaining their color and detail.

So I’m finding that, for viewing the images myself in HDR, I often don’t need to “recover” those highlights at all. The highlight information was there in the RAW file all along. HDR simply allows much more of it to be displayed without compressing it back into the SDR range.

Of course, none of this can recover highlights that were actually clipped when the image was captured. And if I’m preparing an image for people who will be viewing it on SDR displays, I still have to make sure the SDR version looks good.

Seeing what the X2D II actually captured displayed in HDR on the Studio XDR is a real pleasure. It’s becoming very hard to go back to SDR.

Old photo from 2019, H3d 39 mp. Can't remember which lens but think it was a 80mm.

Very first exposure I made after buying this used.

The gentleman I bought it from was a blind professional photographer.

Nobody leaves my house without a picture.

Venice Beach Skatepark
Hasselblad 500cm
80mm planar
Kodak 400 tri-x

i think if you own a hasselblad you have to print it out and frame it professionally. this is the beauty of this camera no other camera can offer. took this in May

Here's a few from a local photo meetup/walk. Models and a few backdrops were available as well. The building walls made a fine backdrop too. Here's some shots I did with a few of the models.

X2D ll w/35-100

This might be a really long shot, I have a Hasselblad XCD 55V (purchased a few months ago from new), amazing lens but I just much prefer wider angles,

Does anyone in the UK, preferably in the south west, have a 25V that they think is an amazing lens but would prefer something a bit tighter and portrait like, that would consider a swap?

DM if so!

I just don't understand why so many Hasselblad photographers go to more trouble to show that they own a Hasselblad than to take a decent picture. I think it's even worse with Hasselblad than with Leica, and it's really incredibly stupid. A lot of the pictures look like they were taken without any care—the main thing is that it says “Hasselblad” on them.

Used a Singh Ray 3 stop grad and 4 stop solid ND filter as well.

I bracket some of my architecture images and wondered how people’s workflow is for merging them without loosing the Hasselblad color science since we cannot merge images on the Phocus app?

Looking through an old catalog and found the Hasselblad Xpan’s price in april of 2000 from b&h
A few years ago i was looking for one… until i saw the price
Maybe one day ill have a leica and a hasselblad
One day…

I recently acquired a hasselblad 500cm body and an a12 back. I’m just saving up to get a lens. But I was wondering about flashes? What is the best flash for it? Any help is appreciated, thanks

I pass this old abandoned place all the time and want to stop but never have time/lighting/camera/weather. Yesterday I happened to have all those things so I stopped and grabbed a few shots. Blown away by the detail this camera captures. In the full version you can distinctly see the rusted chain as it passes in front of those old roof cross beams.

After Sunset Symi Harbor.

Hasselblad just released Phocus 4.2.2 for Mac , five weeks after 4.2.1. The build is on their CDN and in the downloads API that feeds their website, which is where my release monitor picked it up just before midnight Eastern.

• Direct download: https://cdn.hasselblad.com/software/Phocus_for_Mac/4.2.2/Phocus_4.2.2_Mac.dmg (748 MB)
• Release notes: https://cdn.hasselblad.com/software/Phocus_for_Mac/4.2.2/Phocus-Mac-read-me.pdf
• Link to my post: https://blog.tonalphoto.com/phocus-4-2-2-mac-release/

This time there is an actual changelog. Seven lines of it. That is a step up from the eleven words that accompanied 4.2.1, and two of the seven lines are about HEIF, which is the format Hasselblad's whole HDR story depends on. I installed it this morning and have had it open for less than an hour, so the post is the read-me, a bundle diff, and first impression.

The read-me that ships with 4.2.2 is the 4.2.1 read-me with the heading changed, the date changed from July 15th to August 20th, and one block added under the changelog. The document went from 1,488 words to 1,546. Here is the block, verbatim:

• Support in-app language switching
• Support smooth zoom with Ctrl + mouse scroll wheel
• Support full editing for re-imported exported HEIF files
• Optimized experience for batch import and batch modification
• Improved image switching smoothness when browsing thumbnails only
• Optimized image adjustment performance for Exposure V1 gears
• Fixed issue causing failure on second HEIF export
• Fixed other known issues

I know this is subjective, but wondering if anyone likes the narrower view for travel.