Most X2D II frames look about the same brightness in Lightroom Classic as in Phocus. A few come up brighter: an ISO 1600 frame a touch, an occasional frame a full stop. One cause I have measured is a tag inside the raw file.
The tag is BaselineExposure. The DNG specification defines it as how far to move the zero point, in EV (stops of light), with positive values giving brighter default results.¹ ² Some X2D II 3FRs carry a non-zero value, and both Phocus and Lightroom act on it. Lightroom acts on it a little more than Phocus does.
Every number here comes from 300 frames in my X2D II archive, shot between October 2025 and September 2026 at ISO 50 to 1600, on one body. The Lightroom side was scored with a camera profile I built to imitate Phocus. It is a work in progress and I am not handing it out yet.
A note on support: This post represents my personal exploration and testing, not official technical support or guidance from Hasselblad. If you need assistance with your Hasselblad equipment, please contact Hasselblad directly: customersupport@hasselblad.com for global support, support.us@hasselblad.com for the Americas, or visit hasselblad.com/support for regional options.
Key finding: In 300 X2D II frames, 37 carry a non-zero BaselineExposure tag. Phocus 4.2.3 applies it. Lightroom Classic 15.6 applies it too, then adds about 0.2 EV on 5 of the 7 tagged frames I exported. Find tagged files with one exiftool command and lower those frames by about 0.2 EV in Lightroom.
Which X2D II frames carry the BaselineExposure tag?
37 of the 300 frames carry a non-zero tag. The other 263 read zero.
Figure 1. BaselineExposure and ISO read from the 3FR files of 300 frames from my X2D II archive, October 2025 to September 2026.
- +0.086 EV: 34 frames, all at ISO 1600. That is 34 of the 58 ISO 1600 frames in the sample.
- +0.51 EV: one frame, at ISO 1250.
- +1.0 EV: two frames, at ISO 400, both shot on 11 March 2026 with the XCD 120.
ISO 1600 does not decide it. The other 24 ISO 1600 frames read zero. The tagged frames come from four firmware builds (1.1.9.2, 1.2.7.11, 1.2.7.16 and 1.3.16.2), and the untagged ISO 1600 frames come from three of the same builds. Whether firmware matters was not tested, and why the camera writes the tag on some frames and not others is unknown.
The sample stops at ISO 1600, so my ISO invariance measurements of the higher settings say nothing about the tag. My July comparison of Phocus, Capture One and Lightroom saw Lightroom pull ahead of Phocus from ISO 1600 upward and guessed at per-ISO profile offsets. Whether the frames in that test carried this tag has not been checked.
Phocus 4.2.3 applies the tag
Applying the tag's gain to a reference render makes it match Phocus on the frames where it was far off.
I compared a calculated version of my profile's output against Phocus 4.2.3. The measure is dE2000, one number for how different two colors look: about 1 is at the edge of a visible difference side by side, and 5 or more is obvious. The three frames with the largest disagreement, the two +1.0 frames and the +0.51 frame, scored 17.3, 14.8 and 6.7. Scaling the raw data by 2 to the power of the tag value before rendering brought them to 0.6, 0.5 and 0.9. One of the +0.086 frames went from 3.7 to 2.3.
That is an inference from the match. I did not read it out of Phocus. The scope is Phocus 4.2.3, Standard response, the center of the frame, as-shot Daylight white balance and lens corrections off.
Lightroom applies the tag, then adds about 0.2 EV
Lightroom Classic 15.6 does honor the tag in a 3FR, and on most tagged frames it lands brighter than Phocus.
For the first test I exported one +1.0 EV frame from Lightroom with my profile, Exposure 0, As Shot and lens corrections off. I asked what exposure lift on the raw data best explains each program's output. Phocus came out at +1.00 EV and Lightroom at +1.26 EV. Lightroom rendered about 5 L* brighter (L* is the lightness scale where 0 is black and 100 is white), a 4.2 dE difference.
The same export, repeated on seven tagged frames, gave the table below. The last row is 31 untagged frames exported the same way.
| Tag value | Frames | Extra EV in Lightroom beyond Phocus |
|---|---|---|
| +0.086 EV (ISO 1600) | 4 | 0.00, +0.20, +0.24, +0.24 |
| +0.51 EV (ISO 1250) | 1 | +0.08 |
| +1.0 EV (ISO 400) | 2 | +0.26, +0.26 |
| Untagged (various ISO) | 31 | median -0.06, none beyond -0.14 |
Lightroom Classic 15.6, my custom profile, Exposure 0, As Shot, lens corrections off, center of frame, scored against Phocus 4.2.3.
On untagged frames Lightroom's gain sits a median 0.06 EV below Phocus's and never more than 0.14 below. On tagged frames it exceeds Phocus by 0.20 to 0.26 EV in 5 of 7, and the two exceptions are 0.00 and +0.08.
I also exported all 300 frames from Lightroom. Of the 189 frames scored in that set, 15 are tagged. Their median dE2000 against Phocus is 3.64, against 1.51 for the 174 untagged frames, and Lightroom is a median 4.0 L* brighter on the tagged ones.
Why 0.2 EV? This is a hypothesis I have not tested. Lightroom appears to apply a built-in exposure reduction of about 0.2 EV that the Exposure slider does not show, and it may drop that reduction when the tag is present. It fits five of seven frames. It does not explain the two exceptions.
Figure 2. The path of the tag, with the numbers from the one +1.0 EV frame. Lightroom Classic 15.6, my custom profile, lens corrections off.
A camera profile cannot fix it
A profile applies one fixed set of adjustments to every frame it is assigned to. It has no way to say "subtract 0.2 EV only when this file carries the tag". The tagged frames above were scored with a profile built to match Phocus on untagged frames, so they show what a profile leaves behind.
All of the Lightroom scoring used that profile. Whether the extra 0.2 EV appears with Adobe's default profile has not been tested.
What this sample cannot tell you
- The +1.0 EV result rests on two frames, one lens, one day.
- The +0.51 EV result rests on one frame.
- ISO above 1600, other bodies and other Lightroom versions were not sampled.
- Phocus's behavior is inferred from matching renders, not from its code.
What to do about it
Find the tagged files first. This lists every 3FR in a folder and its subfolders that has a non-zero BaselineExposure:
exiftool -r -ext 3FR -if '$IFD0:BaselineExposure' -p '$FileName ISO $ISO BaselineExposure $IFD0:BaselineExposure' /path/to/folder
Each tagged file prints one line with its filename, ISO and tag value. Files without the tag are skipped.
In Lightroom Classic, select the tagged frames, open the Develop module, and in the Basic panel set Exposure to about -0.20. That matches Lightroom to Phocus's brightness. It does not say which one is right. It will overcorrect some frames: -0.2 would have been too much on the two of seven test frames where Lightroom was within 0.08 EV of Phocus.
Do not set a Develop default for ISO 1600. 24 of the 58 ISO 1600 frames carry no tag and would come out 0.2 EV dark. In Phocus, change nothing.
Still owed: the same seven-frame export with Adobe's default profile, to see whether the extra 0.2 EV is there without mine, and a run of the command above on the +1.0 EV frame from the archive to show its output line here.
This page is one of four from the same profile project. The summary, with every limit on one sheet, is What a Lightroom camera profile can and cannot reproduce from Phocus.