Halos on frosted leaves

[Karticus]

Him

I tried to fotograph frosted leaves. Unfortunately a lot of halos are created. Especially, where one leave runs over the other. While rendering it looks as if everything is correctly identified, however, the final picture contains very blury sections (see attached examples with setting B). I tried different methods and had the most success with method C, but still this artifact is very noticeable. Any ideas for better settings?

Kind regards

Konstantin

[Catherine]

Hi Konstantin,

These halos are typical and to some degree unavoidable when you have overlapping features in the foreground and background. Use the retouching brush, scroll through the source images, and see if you can fix this by painting the blurry area from one of the sources where it's in focus.
If you can fix it with retouching, that would mean Helicon Focus didn't do a perfect job, we will look into it if you can give us the faulty stack. But often times you will find that it cannot be fixed due to focus breathing.

[Karticus]

Hi,

thank you. I will try later this week. I noticed heavy focus breathing in the blurred areas.. so it probably can not be fixed...

Kind regards

Konstantin

[machoman]

Yes - i'm learning that not everything can be successfully focus stacked, especially when there's large elements crossing each other, like a branch or leaves. The best focus stacking candidates are the ones that have minimal skinny or tiny things sticking out