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1. #Best helicon focus tutorials how to#
2. #Best helicon focus tutorials software#
3. #Best helicon focus tutorials professional#

This takes longer, of course, but will produce the best results. Zerene Stacker has a choice to run both PMax and DMap together.

#Best helicon focus tutorials how to#

And there is a particular order in how to combine them.

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However PMax is to my knowledge not offered by any other software and it really shines at reproducing fine detail, and this is where IMO the other software falls down.Īnd although the two methods can be seen as alternatives, choosing one method or another, the best thing to do is to run them both and combine them. DMap is more or less what the other stacking software on the market offer and most programs do a decent job. Zerene Stacker offers what it calls DMap and PMax stacking algorithms. However, in my experience, only Zerene Stacker’s (ZS) two techniques are radically different from one another, and only ZS can handle very fine overlapping hair or bristles successfully, albeit by sacrificing a tiny bit of color exactness and by increasing noise somewhat. Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker both offer two main ways to stack. Most of the existing stacking programs offer more than one technique for getting results. Trying to separate one overlapping detail from the other can be too difficult for the program with the result that where the two intersect are some out-of-focus blurs that are not welcome. This is really the same halo-problem discussed above but in a smaller example. Along the edge of the leaf a small dark halo appears that catches our attention every time and can spoil the photo.Īnother common artifact occurs when one object in the detail overlaps another but is at a distance above or below it. Perhaps the most common type of artifact is what is called a “halo,” an artifact which manifests when a sharply defined edge of an object (like a leaf) is contrasted by the more distant background bokeh behind it. The artifacts are not entirely random and can be grouped into general types. While most artifacts may be lost to even the vigilant eye there usually (or often) are stubborn artifacts that detract from the finished photograph. Where the samples come together there are always holes or gaps and this naturally produces artifacts that may or may not blend well in the final photo.

The problem inherent in focus stacking is that because it is essentially a sampling technique (like CDs, DVDs, etc.), by definition sampling ‘samples” parts of the whole and leaves other parts out.

And its retouching features are almost ideal and this is what I will be looking at here in this post.

#Best helicon focus tutorials professional#

Since I am a systems programmer I guess I am allowed a professional opinion and I must say that this is a wonderful piece of programming that Zerene Stacker’s author Rik Littlefield has put together. There are many roads that lead to Rome and we can’t easily walk them all to the end, so at least for now I am walking with Zerene Stacker. I checked out (and purchased!) various focus-stacking programs and finally settled on Zerene Stacker as being IMO the best of the lot. Some of the focus-stacking software is amazing at what it can do considering there is no human making real-time on-the-spot decisions when they are needed. That being said, let’s talk a bit about retouching stacked photos. Things change and even I do too, albeit probably more slowly than average. Well, I am all grown up now and habituated to retouching just as I had to learn to enjoy stacking the photos in the first place. This just shows you how little I understood about the mechanics of focus stacking, like: there is no way to avoid retouching most photos. I did not have the patience and at that time I still felt that if a photo needed retouching then I had done something wrong.

Still, retouching stacked photos was not something that I warmed to easily.

Of course, the results of focus stacking did grab my attention and ever-so gradually I became addicted and was drawn into the long (and sometimes painful) process of stacking photos. I was a close-up photographer and this focus stacking was just something I was experimenting with and pretty much a nuisance at that. Believe it or not, at the time I felt that focus stacking was already such an almighty inconvenience that I was damned if I would add insult to injury by having to fiddle with the finished stacked photo. If it needed retouching, I just ignored that photo and concentrated on those that were OK. Way back when I was first getting into focus stacking, I refused to retouch, ever.