Pentax 645z Capture One

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  • If you are using Capture One and are trying to tether the Ricoh Pentax 645z via a hotfolder and Image Transmitter 2, you'll probably know already that Captur.
  • CHANGE dropcapYou know, forcing one to compete can be a good thing. One has to adapt to the competition, meaning that one has to find ways to be unique, to be seen as separate, better, distinct. Take for example the digital medium format camera world. Despite of what anyone might tell you, a 645Z for $8500 takes just as good of a picture as a Hasselbad H50C, or IQ250 back from PhaseOne, but.

Yes, this short post will show you how you can open and tweek your Pentax 645z DNG files in Capture One (involving some tampering with the EXIF data). But don’t get your hopes up too much. At least with me, Capture One often crashed with with the DNGs from the 645z. And the color looks just not quite right out of the box. But it’s a start.

Pentax 645z capture one manual

Pentax 645z Used

The Pentax 645Z is a digital medium format camera. It is equipped with a 51.4MP censor, which was designed without an anti-aliasing filter to maximize sharpness and details. Its wide ISO range provides low noise, low light capability, and the image processor allows for fast image capture. Capture One is the amazing program, especially for tethering. We have organised much of our workflow with Capture One, so the lack of support make the Pentax images harder to integrate and work with. A vast number of pros in fashion and commercial shoots use Capture One, will make it harder to get into that market. You may have heard that Capture One will open DNG files from the Pentax 645Z, which is entirely true. Just don’t expect to be able to do anything especially useful beyond that.

Pentax 645z Review

  1. This only works with DNG files, so don’t shoot PEF!
  2. Download and install exiftools, a free open-source perl tool to do the EXIF tampering: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
  3. Make sure your DNGs (and optionally JPGs) are all in a folder with no other photos or files in them
  4. Open your terminal and navigate to that folder, e.g.
    cd ~/Desktop/myimportedDNGs
  5. Change the “camera model name” field from “Pentax 645z” to “IQ250” using the following command
    exiftool -model=IQ250
  6. Open CaptureOne and move the tampered DNG files into a new session. The default settings will be way off, but like I said, it’s a start

Let me know in the comments, how this worked for you. Are there any CaptureOne functions not available at all or crashing the software with these tampered DNGs?

Pentax 645z Capture One Review

Windows users: exiftool is available for Windows as well, but the command might look slightly different. Check the documentation and don’t ask me ;-).