bad quality Live View. Sony a7r iii

[ziago]

Hi, I have been a Helicon Remote user for years and I can only say that without this software some of my jobs would have been really difficult to do (I also get clients with 800 products all requiring focus stacking photography).

I have a serious problem with Live View though: the quality is really too low to accurately understand whether the point of the subject closest to the camera is in focus or not.

I set the live view quality to high in Remote and activated noise reduction on live view but without great results.

The live view image is really very "soft" and having to photograph multiple subjects, I sometimes have to perfect shooting point A.

How can I solve it?

Thank you

(zoom is not possible with my camera in Remote)

[Catherine]

Hi,

To the best of our knowledge, the live view quality is the best it can be. You can install the (free) Sony Imaging Edge software to compare the quality.
There is no live view quality option in Helicon Remote, it's always as good as possible. You probably mean the "Preview quality" option which concerns the Preview/Fast Preview function, it's not about live view.

The best advice I can give is to use "Fast peview" to assess focus. Maybe the "Show focused" function will also help, but with a "soft" image its capabilities are of course limited. But "Show focused" should work well with fast preview, maybe try that.

And yes, there is no support for zoom with Sony cameras in Helicon Remote, not yet. The way Sony implements zoom makes it very difficult to integrate into our software, but it's in the works.

[ziago]

Hi Catherine,
Thanks for your quick response.
No, I actually mean the preview of the live view. I tried to see the live view feed with Capture One and the quality is significantly superior, the focus is certainly more visible with Capture One than with Helicon Remote.

I'll show you two comparison images.

Also the option to preview the focused part doesn't help much!

Helicon Remote Live View:


Capture One Live View:

[ziago]

Another "strange" thing I noticed is that if I set "Live View display" to "Original Size" in the settings, the image is very small.
While to have a full screen Live View I have to select "Fit and Smooth"

[Catherine]

Another "strange" thing I noticed is that if I set "Live View display" to "Original Size" in the settings, the image is very small.
While to have a full screen Live View I have to select "Fit and Smooth"

Original size means 1:1, one pixel of the live view image maps to one pixel of the screen. Since the resolution of your screen is much higher than the live view resolution, this is what you see.

We will check the image in Capture One.

[ziago]

Hello and thank you for your response.

Any news?

I relied on Helicon for an important job where there are more than 100 pieces to shoot in focus stacking and I can't even imagine the time wasted having to check the initial focus every time with the "preview" just because the quality of the Live View it is not adequate with other software.