Let’s start with some historical perspective. Here you see the Imacon/Hasselblad Flexcolor software. This has a decidedly old-school feel to it, and you can probably recognize a lot of the features if you’ve used any of the high-end drum or “virtual drum” scanner systems.

Imacon/Hasselblad Flexcolor software
(Click to view full-res)
 

The main workspace is pretty standardized, and you can’t really customize it except to move the floating panels around. The file browser is a completely different window. Switching between the browser and the processing windows requires a change of screens, often quite inconvenient on a small display. There are some sorting, flagging and processing features here, as well as access to your file and batch processing. It is, at best, a system that requires a fairly respectable learning curve to understand how to use the more powerful features.

Flexcolor Workspace/Scratchpad
(Click to view full-res)
 

Take a look at where this has gone with the release of Phocus. Here’s the main workspace:

Hasselblad Phocus Workspace
(Click to view full-res)

The similarities between this, the other processing systems and Lightroom and Aperture are really quite interesting. Let’s take a look at the Phase One and Leaf workspaces as well. Here’s Phase One and Leaf Capture:

Phase One Capture One Workspace (Click to view full-res)

Leaf Capture Workspace (Click to view full-res)

In the context of the recent past versions, the layout of these three systems is clearly converging and based on the integration of a browser/preview window and a series of control panels - both for adjustments and workflow.

Let’s take a look at the basic navigation.

The first step in a tethered-camera workflow is to connect to the camera and manage your shoot folders and backups. As you work through that, you’re adjusting and controlling the exposures and color, and then you specify and target the output. All three systems handle this with a series of tabs or buttons at the top of the control panel. Phase One’s looks like this:

Phase One Capture One
 

The user is intended to work in an orderly fashion: from setting up a shoot folder structure, adjusting, inspecting and then processing. Interestingly, Phase One has a preset structure it builds for you as a “Session.” Using the Session structure you can work with some pretty powerful, well-designed processes, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you have your own habits and processes, it’s fairly easy to customize the folders and save the structure. This workspace, by the way, is completely customizable simply by dragging and dropping the icons to work in whatever sequence you prefer, including deleting any icons you don’t use. 

This interface is remarkably similar to the very first Phase One shooting software I saw about ten years ago, and it’s a testament to a very clean, workable design.

Let’s have a look at the Phocus workspace:

Hasselblad Phocus - Workspace tabs
 

The strategy is the same, however the order is a little different. The four main tabs - Capture, Browse, Adjust and Export - all have a series of collapsible dropdown sub-menus. This point is a fairly standard solution for managing a large array of controls. You simply collapse the features you prefer not to use, and you can turn them on or off with a simple checkbox shown here.

Just for fun, here’s Lightroom. Look familiar? Same strategy, slightly different layout.

Hasselblad Phocus

Adobe Lightroom

The Leaf software uses a slightly different twist on the theme. You still have the main workflow tabs on the top of the controls pane, but they’re set up a little differently - by subject, for lack of a better term.

Here’s the toolbar, and you can see the basic tabs: Browse, Shoot, Adjust and Process.

Leaf Capture Toolbar
 

Under these tabs are a few sub-tabs depending on the main tab you’re working with.

Sub-tabs in Leaf Capture

The sub-tab pane is also managed using dropdowns. Here’s the main shoot window showing the little dropdown arrows on the left of the heading.

Leaf Capture - Shoot Pane

The little arrows on the right of the heading are for tool options. Here are the options for the Develop settings, for example.

Leaf Capture Tool Options
 

Here’s an interesting premise. If most photographers running this software are experienced with Adobe products (and who isn’t?), then wouldn’t it follow that they’d be more comfortable with a control panel system that resembled an Adobe product? The feeling I’m getting is that Hasseblad has taken a big leapfrog over the competition by making a dramatic break from their legacy scanner product to a product that fits very comfortably within an Adobe family of products.

Just to play devil’s advocate, Phase One would argue that you can work within the Phase One architecture for all of your needs - DSLR as well as MFDB, and that the system is a much more versatile, powerful design. It’s an idea that’s hard to argue with, since the software is so powerful. Leaf, for their part, clings to a system that moves closer to the convention but still takes some adaptation. With Phase One acquiring Leaf in June 2009, evolution in the two companies’ software is inevitable.