Inconsistent Hasselblad .fff and .3fr loading ACR 5.4rc

Question

hi all,
i'm excited about the Hasselbald support in ACR 5.4, i've loaded the release candidate build from labs.adobe.com.
Does anyone know whether ACR 5.4 is supposed to support both hasselblad .fff and .3fr files (and for that matter, both .fff's made by Flexcolor and those made by Phocus, as their internal format is different) ?
I've found that file support for .fff's is very mixed. Some files open (i'm opening them from 'Open in Camera Raw...' in Bridge CS4), but many do not.
If you'd like sample files of those that don't load, try the raw sample files that Hasselblad have on their own website.
http://hasselblad.co.uk/downloads/images.aspx
For me, none of these images preview in Bridge and none will open in ACR.
But i do have some .fff files from an H1D which preview and load fine!
am i missing something, or is .fff file support really patchy ?
regards,
alex.

Answer 1

Jeff,
Hasselblad's goofy file formats do things that DNG doesn't do and probably never will due to the reasons given by Mr. Knoll in a post seen further in this thread. Sure you can fix CA, Vignetting and Lens correcting perspective in Photoshop but in a much more laborious and probably inaccurate fashion.
I shoot tethered for the most part so I haven't imported from cards at all and don't know if DNGs are directly possible, but with my copy of Phocus (the latest until the new update that I can't wait for) you can still output to DNG. In fact in a way similar to Russell Brown's Image Processor you can output to a variety of formats in one fell swoop. Limited to two different formats at a time so far, but it has been suggested that more will be possible in the future.
I too was surprised to see the results when I opened a .fff file and saw the image but apparently the image was the files preview as it was a small size. Since I shoot tethered I guess that I never actually have a 3FR file, I think it must be changed to a .fff when it lands on my hard drive.
As an owner and user of Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture Phocus and Flexcolor I have been trying to figure out my path to the perfect workflow. They all have their strengths and weakness' for me. Aperture does recognize Hasselblad files and works very well with my Nikon D3 too even allowing me to limited tethering possibilities. But without question Phocus processes Hasselblad's captures that I make to a significantly superior file for my uses in my eyes without me having to do much. If I want to alter my captures, Phocus allows me many paths to alter a bunch of the parameters to my hearts content and hopefully I won't X@%& up my files by messing with them too much .
I thank Adobe for continuing to update their apps to work with the slew of options in the market today, certainly a daunting task. I hope that I will somehow be able to use ACR with my .fff files sometime in the future.
You may have negative feelings toward Hasselblad if I read your remark correctly but I thank them for forging ahead with Phocus and although it is very much a work in progress, it is a very nice piece of software in its current state. As with the continuous improvements we have all seen with Adobe's apps, Hasselblad with a much smaller audience is making the same sorts of incremental progress on their baby.
Sorry for posting so late in the thread, I don't read this forum and was lead here by a link from the Hasselblad Digital Forum while trying to suss out ACR's relations with Hasselblad's RAWs after updating to 5.4 yesterday.
Sincerely,
Scott Smith