FFF file somehow corrupt after applying exiftool

[mristuccia]

Hi Phil,

first of all thank you for the great work!
I started using Exiftool to automatically add some annotations to my Hasselblad FFF RAW files before developing them with Phocus, the official Hasselblad RAW developer. Specifically I only use the -Instructions and the -UserComments tags.
So, after going through Exiftool, the FFF files behaves in a strange way when opened back in Phocus: all developing changes made with Phocus are not reported anymore in the thumbnail nor in the image preview. The preview and the thumbnail remain frozen to the aspect they had before applying Exiftool.  The jpeg export however includes all the changes.

Could you be so kind and give me some support on this?
Thanks in advance!

[Phil Harvey]

I'll see if I can download Phocus and test this out when I get a chance.  Hopefully this is possible and they have a Mac version, otherwise it may be difficult to track this down.

- Phil

[mristuccia]

Yes Phocus is free and there is a Mac version, which is the one I currently use. Just create a free account at hasselblad.com. Or, if you prefer, I can provide you a download link from my private cloud.

By the way, I'm on MacOS Mojave (10.14.6) and I'm using the latest Exiftool 11.87

Thank you,
Marco

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Marco,

OK.  I've looked into this.  There is something very funny about the way preview information is stored in FFF files, and I'm sure this is the root of the problem:  Both IFD0 and IFD1 reference a reduced-resolution image, but point to the same data block (and this data block is rewritten by Phocus when any settings are changed).  However, immediately following this block there is a large chunk of unreferenced data that does not change with the Phocus settings.  Presumably this could be related to the original preview, but since it is unreferenced it is lost when rewriting.  Relying on unreferenced blocks like this is extremely bad form, and it would be a real pain for me to patch ExifTool to preserve this in FFF files.  I understand the inconvenience of this problem, but I really don't like the idea of adding a very messy patch to ExifTool to work around this, so for now I am just adding this to the list of Known Problems on the ExifTool home page.

- Phil

[mristuccia]

Hi Phil,

I can understand your concerns.
But this basically means that we should not use Exiftool to tag Hasselblad FFF files because this badly breaks the functionality of further editing the RAW files with the "Official Hasselblad RAW developer".
It is not only the small thumbprint preview that doesn't work, the big preview that gives us a feedback on the settings we apply doesn't work either .
So I'd suggest putting Exiftool in "read-only" mode for FFF files and updating the documentation of the supported RAW types according. That of course IMHO.

Thank you in any case for having looked into this.

Kind regards,
marco

[Phil Harvey]

OK, I'll do this in the next version, and allow editing FFF files only with the -m option.

- Phil

[mristuccia]

Hi Phil,

I just want to let you know that also in Lightroom I experience the same problem.
So this unfortunately makes Exiftool unusable for FFF files, because it is impossible to further work raw files after tagging them with it.

You mentioned it as a minor problem, I think it is a major one.

I strongly hope that sooner or later you'll manage to put some time find a solution for this.
In the meantime do you happen to know any other software that we Hasselblad users could use in place of Exiftool?

Thanks again,
marco

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Marco,

I can not reproduce your observations regarding LightRoom.

I just tried using Exiftool 11.89 to write -artist=me to FFF files from Hasselblad CFV-39, H2D-39, H3D, H6D-100c and X1D-50c cameras.

Then I opened them and adjusted the exposure using LR 5.71 (CameraRaw 8.7.1), and everything worked fine, including the thumbnails getting updated.

- Phil

[mristuccia]

For example, when using the "Enhanced Details..." feature (in menu "Photo") the generated DNG files have a wrong image preview.
When replicating settings from one image to another, they will not always be taken, especially when replicating to those generated DNG files.
But I didn't explore all the possibilities yet. Generally it seems that something is broken here and there.

m/

[Phil Harvey]

Can you verify that the behaviour is different for files that were not edited by ExifTool?

- Phil

Edit:  My version of LR does not have an "Enhanced Details..." item in the "Photo" menu.  Also, I'm confused by your talk of DNG files and where they come into this.  How did you generate those?  -- It doesn't sound to me as if the "Enhanced Details..." menu would produce an output DNG file.

[mristuccia]

It seems it does not happen with FFF files not touched by Exiftool.
I will make more tests and let you know.

Thanks for the immediate feedback,
marco

[mristuccia]

Hi Phil,

I made some tests with different images. It seems that most of the times everything works smoothly.
I had only two cases in which the image previews were totally messed up. At this point I don't know, maybe it is a bug of LR CC.

Will let you know in case the tagging and editing process becomes totally unusable.

Kind regards,
marco

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for keeping me informed.

- Phil