I always recommend shooting your stack in a consistent sequence, but if you have not, or have been doing the "bobbing" method of shooting, you still have Method A available. Gives good results in complex cases (intersecting objects, deep stacks), though increases contrast and glare.īy bringing more choices to the table, Helicon Focus helps you best deal with specific shooting or file order scenarios. Method C uses pyramid approach to image processing dividing image signals into high and low frequencies.Perfectly renders textures on smooth surfaces. This method imposes strict requirements on the order of images - it should always be consecutive. Method B selects the source image containing the sharpest pixel and uses this information to form the "depth map".This method works better for short stacks and preserves contrast and color. Method A computes the weight for each pixel based on its contrast and then forms the weighted average of all pixels from all source images.Here's a brief explanation of each method and its most typical applications: You can choose between three algorithms of focus stacking: methods A, B, and C. I copied the information directly from the web documentation to avoid screwing up any definitions. ![]() Once open, you select the RENDER option, which will build you a TIFF file that combines all the images. You point it at the folder or directory where your originals are and open them. Helicon Focus automates the whole darn process. What this means is that if Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW can open your RAW files, so can Helicon Focus.Ĭonverting to TIFF isn't that hard, but it takes time and space. Helicon Focus can work with TIFF or JPEG files, similar to what we would find in other tools such as ZereneStacker, but can also handle your native RAW files, because it calls the Adobe DNG Converter to do the conversion from proprietary RAW formats to the DNG format. This is a product dedicated and designed to do one thing, extraordinarily well, and that one thing is the production of a final image from a series of focus stacked images. Most of the attendees have the Adobe Photographer's Bundle, and so have Photoshop CC which does pretty darn good focus stacking, but some object to subscription software and others wanted something that was perhaps easier to use and that was more focused on stacking, as it were.Īnd therein lies Helicon Focus from the nice folks at HeliconSoft. I gathered a good copy of each of the current USA coins and decided to make a stacked pyramid of them – if you simply pile them on top of each other, you can’t really see what the coins are, and so I laid them out carefully across the top of a piano (for a reflective surface) and had to prop some of the higher coins up with smaller coins and folded paper to make it work! As you can see, the coins are laying at a steep angle away from the camera, and so any one shot would have a very thin area of focus.I've recently done some tutorials on macro photography and a popular sub-topic to this kind of work is the subject of Focus Stacking. The main software also comes with a neat program called Helicon Remote, which can directly control a range of digital SLRs as I will demonstrate below.įirst, the setup. The program is available directly from their site, and you can get a fully operational 30 day trial version to see if it is worthwhile for you. Helicon Focus is the gold standard in focus stacking and this blog post outlines some of its capabilities. ![]() Photoshop does have some capabilities here (in the Auto Blend commands), and they do work some of the time, but they are slow and not that great. ![]() The main problem with macro images is the extremely narrow depth of field, so you can take a photo of a coin straight on, and get it all in focus, but if you wanted to take a stack of coins laying flat on the table, no manipulation of the aperture would increase the depth of field sufficiently to capture the whole pile in detail. On hot days (and cold ones in winter) taking macro studio shots can be a great way of building up your portfolio.
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