12/28/2023 0 Comments Photoacute vs helicon focusIn the most difficult set, two clusters of mushrooms spaced an inch or two apart are in the composition and part of the rear cluster is close to the background. The mushroom photo sets provided a challenge for both the products. It hadn’t dawned on me to start the image captures from the start. On review of the separate slices, I discovered I had absentmindedly removed the pine needle half way through the capture of the image slices. In the Photoshop images it looks normal, but in the Helicon Focus image it appears in pieces. There is a pine needle near the base of the large leaf at the back of the plant. It is important to try both methods in Helicon Focus Method A produced a nice soft background and Method B resulted in a mottled background, so method A was clearly the choice for this images set. However, if the image were cropped to eliminate the mismatch along the edges of the image, it would be very similar to the Helicon Focus images. At first glance it appears that Photoshop includes more area in the composite image. In the photograph of the rattlesnake orchid plant, the halo effects along the stem and the leaves were greatly reduced in Helicon Focus, but other anomalies appeared. The comparison of Photoshop and Helicon Focus image stacks is extensive and can be found HERE. The image below is the result of Method B.įor convenience, I’ll compare a few of the many focus stacks I made from the subjects I photographed. Also, Helicon Focus provides two processing methods and encourages the use of both to choose the best result. One thing to keep in mind is that this image has a sharp foreground object, an out-of-focus background, and the images were taken with the camera and subject motionless. In the Costa Rica orchid image, there were no noticeable halos or misalignments, and the composite images looked good with none of the pinched paper or edge overlap effects displayed in the image processed in Photoshop. However, that’s not to say that all the Helicon Focus composite images were error free. Helicon Focus software did much better at combining the in-focus background with the in-focus foreground objects of my first image stack, the orchid from Costa Rica. In many cases one did a better job of merging the slices than the other, and occasionally neither product was able to cope with the elements in the composition. The first thing I did was to process the same sets of image captures in Helicon Focus software and Photoshop. All of the background objects (the stem and farthest blossoms) are a softly rendered out-of-focus.Īfter photographing flowers, mushrooms, spiders and water drops, I now had 30 sets of image captures made to support my experiments with focus stacking. The image on the left is a section of the nine slice stack and the one on the right is a section of the stack of the five slices at the front of the subject. One approach that salvaged the set of image captures was to change the objective for that image merge the captures of the blossoms at the front of the plant instead of trying to have sharp details from front to back of the orchid. I also tried reversing the order of the images in the stack, which did not improve the image either. I tried dividing the image sets into smaller groups for stacking then combining the stacked images into another stack. I also spent a lot of time attempting to reduce or eliminate the haloing problem on the rattlesnake orchid image stacks. To further understand focus stacking and to compare the good, bad and ugly of Photoshop auto-merge, Helicon Focus and potentially other focus stacking software, I set out to capture sets of images to challenge the technique.
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