03/17/25 Hasselblad–Major Disconnect with HNNR and Phocus, Please Fix

By now most folks shooting Hasselblad digital realize that with Phocus Mobile 2, Hasselblad released HNNR, which is their AI ruled noise reduction application. And the good news is HNNR does an excellent job of removing both excess noise and more importantly hot pixels, (which for me become problematic at times with the X2D). However besides the terrible workflow to get to HNNR there is a much bigger issue. If you use HNNR and create a new 3FR raw, you can no longer use Phocus Desktop software on these files as Phocus desktop adds extra noise reduction and in most cases, removes all the finer details. The catch: if you can’t use Phocus Desktop, you can no longer take advantage of HNCS.

For me purchasing the X2D camera and lenses was all about HNCS. I had read enough about it for years but until you try their software you can’t really see the difference. And there is a difference. You see much better colors, shadow recovery, and even at times better details. If you are using Lr/ACR with the X2D or any other Hasselblad camera, I feel you are missing out on the single most important aspect of their system.

I finally reached out to Hasselblad support about this problem and their response was less then stellar: “From my understanding, noise reduction for Phocus desktop is automated and cannot be disabled. This is an intentional feature that likely will not be removed anytime soon.” So this implies that for the near and far term if you want to use Phocus desktop to enable HNCS, then you can’t use HNNR!. Personally I can’t believe this is the response and that they are not able to add a feature to Phocus so that this issue doesn’t occur on import. Adobe seems able to do it why not Hasselblad, after all it’s their software? Amazing.

Just to show that the issue is not minor I have included some screen shots to show examples.

Example taken from Phocus Desktop 3.8.4 on a MacBook Pro M1

This screen shot shows a Phocus Mobile 2 HNNR after importing to Phocus, I hope that you can see just how smeared the pine tree needles are.

Direct Phocus import Screenshot Phocus Desktop 3.8.4 MacBook Pro M1

This is the same image as a straight 3FR imported straight Phocus. Yes, there is noise in the image I turned off all noise reduction in Phocus to show as much as detail as possible. Phocus Desktop can help some on the noise, but will do nothing to remove hot pixel noise, something that HNNR does close to 99%.

Phocus Desktop import of Phocus Mobile 2 HNNR 3FR, Phocus Desktop 3.84. MacBook Pro M1 

Phocus mobile 2 HNNR opened in Phocus, all the details of the pine needles are gone totally smeared.

Phocus Desktop Import of non HNNR treated 3FR, Phocus Desktop 3.84. Macbookpro M1 

Another view, straight import into Phocus desktop. Yes, again there is noise, but the details are so much bette and again I had the noise reduction off in Phocus.

One response I received from Hasselblad was to just export the HNNR’s from Phocus Mobile 2 as tif and work on them. Again not what I want to do, I might as well not be shooting raw.

And many still feel that the “camera standard” profile in Lr is OK. I have tried over and over to make this work, but it’s not going to give anywhere the same colors as HNCS. So that’s out. See examples below.

Lr version of 3FR 9797 

Phocus version of 3FR 9797

Really the only thing I find that Lr/ACR does better is the ability to save highlights as Phocus even with the recovery slider misses extreme highlights. But in these two examples the greens are so much better along with the overall blend of color and the sky is vastly superior. Shadows are also much better resolved in Phocus as Lr tends to blacken shadows too much.

By creating the HNNR process, Hasselblad has moved quickly to the fore front of noise reduction processing, albeit at a total loss of the cornerstone of their entire digital camera marketing and prowess HNCS. The fact that Hasselblad has not released anything about to an upcoming fix for this issue is frankly an amazing oversight.

NOTE:  There is nothing wrong with the 3FR treated with HNNR as seen in this screenshot taken from Lr:  The image is clean of basically all noise and it still retains all of the finer details.  It’s just that since I have imported a 3FR into Lr, I am forced into the “camera standard” profile and no longer can use HNCS.  This is HUGE HUGE issue.  Please fix this Hasselblad.

200% view of HNNR 3FR from Phocus Mobile 2 imported to Lr

Notes on comparison images: Please understand that Phocus Desktop has a very limited toolset i.e. sky select is not an option. The image shown of 9797 from Phocus has a lot of problems in the upper right due to the inability to select the sky and then invert it to help pull up the shadows on the trees to the right. This was fixed later on. I wanted to show this view more for the difference in color.

Obvious everyone has different priorities and how they process out files. I used my standard process with in Lr and Phocus to gain what I felt was the best representation of the image. I feel strongly that Lr limits X2D raw conversion with the “camera standard” color profile.

Paul C

Written for Photos of Arkansas by Paul Caldwell 03/17/25, please ask for permission to re-print.