Doubled image issue when stacking

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lostsole1
Posts: 6
Joined: 01.09.2020 16:28

Doubled image issue when stacking

Post by lostsole1 »

Hi,

I'm bulk stacking macro images of sections of gigapixel photos by the hundreds of photos. I'm stacking Canon 5Ds or Nikon D810 raw files into DNG format. Out of the hundreds of bulk stacks, every time I have several images that are doubled when finished. They look as if I jarred the camera on one of the images in the stack, but I didn't. Now, if I go and re-stack the group manually, then it usually will line it up right. So, there seems to be a misalignment issue that occurs only when doing bulk stacking, and only quite randomly. But, enough of them it's a big pain to go in and fix them, restack, resave, etc.

Any idea why this is happening or what can be done?

Thanks,

Deven
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Catherine
Posts: 1156
Joined: 29.04.2019 22:38

Re: Doubled image issue when stacking

Post by Catherine »

Could you please let us know if the problem persists in the same workflow, but with jpegs?
lostsole1
Posts: 6
Joined: 01.09.2020 16:28

Re: Doubled image issue when stacking

Post by lostsole1 »

I believe I can answer that now. I am quite positive that it did not happen with jpgs or tiff. Earlier on I didn't know I could do DNG stacking, so all I did were jpg and tiff stacks and I never had the problem that I recall. The doubling issue seems to have exclusively began with DNG stacking and it happens consistently with each gigapixel I work on.

Adding further to this problem. When I go to manually focus the doubled bad stacks in the batch, sometimes it won't line up right using B method, so then I try A method and it works, or A doesn't work, and then I try B. In other words, manual doesn't always fix it the first time I try. It's quite strange.

But, again, yes it did not seem to occur prior to stacking DNG. I don't recall this issue happening at all before using the DNG protocol.

Now that I know about DNG stacking, I wish to use this process rather than jpg/tiff because it gives me so much more freedom for adjustments without having to go and put hundreds of images into stacks again if I need to make changes to the gigapixel.

Btw, the doubled effect does vary. Sometimes the doubling looks as if I jarred the camera during shooting harder and other times the doubled effect is more slight. Sometimes it will happen with two or three frames in a row. Other times it is just random single frames. There's no rhyme or reason to it that I can see.

If needed, I'm running a dual Xeon 16 core server with Windows 10 and 352 GB of ram and a GTX 1070 vid card. In other words I don't think it's a resources issue. The doubling also seems to occur whether I'm doing other work on the PC at the same time I'm stacking, OR if the PC is only running Helicon Focus overnight.

Another issue I'm having is Helicon crashes my PC if I'm using Photoshop at the same time while working on gigapixel photos. (This is during Helicon batch processing) This happens predictably nearly every time both programs are in action.

The crash consists of the display will suddenly go black and I can't control/alt/delete to get the display back, and I have to reboot. Helicon and Photoshop are setup to use different drives for cache/scratch disks. And PS is set to not use up all the ram either and give plenty to Helicon. So, I'm not sure what's happening there either.

Another issue that happens with using PS/Helicon at the same time, is instead of crashing, the stack images in Helicon have the exclamation point warning that some of the batch stacks didn't work. The work around for me is to not use PS while I'm stacking with Helicon in batch mode.

Those issues aside, I love Helicon Focus! Amazing software!

Thank you,

Deven
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