Helicon Soft Forum

Hi there -

apologies if this has been asked before, but couldn't find anything directly relevant...

I have a large piece of jewelry I working with, using a Nikon 200/f4 "micro" lens.

I'm new to focus stacking, and have to do this manually via Nikon Capture Control due to the older design of my lens.

So, for each position that the lens is focused on, I take 5 exposure-bracket shots. In the Nikon app, I hit the '+' sign inside Live View 5x, which advances the lens to the next focal plane. Take another 5 exposure-bracket shots.

All told, I had 6 different focal plane locations, and 5 bracketed shots (varying only the shutter of course), so a total of 30 images.

When creating a stacked final result should I
(A): choose the best exposed image from each focal plane, and stack using only those 6 different frames or
(B): just use all 30 images (5 bracketed shots x 6 locations), and let HF do all the work?

Thanks for your help!!!

We’d recommend the following workflow:

- run HF
- go to top menu->File->Batch mode, or press F7 to enter Batch mode
- add the entire folder with all the 30 exposures
- choose Split stack in the dropdown menu
- select By exposure and click Split button

This will split the images by exposure, and stacks of images with similar exposure will be processed in HF.
Then produced results should be saved and HDR merged using specialized tools or software.