Focus stacked landscape pano

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Bill T.
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Joined: 23.04.2010 07:33
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
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Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Bill T. »

Just wanted to thank all you great Helicon Focus Pro programmers for a terrific program! The user interface is first rate, and the ability to export directly from Lightroom to Helicon Focus Pro is absolutely wonderful. A lot of thought went into making Helicon fit well into the workflow and it shows.

This is stitch made up of 4 stacks, 5 images per stack. In the thirty inch high prints you can see everything sharp as a tack from the nearest pebbles to tree branches on the mountain tops. My customers are just amazed by that.

Image
joey

Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by joey »

Looks good Bill
What camera sys did you use?
joe
Bill T.
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Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
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Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Bill T. »

Canon 5DMKII with an old 55mm manual focus Micro Nikkor, and a homebrew pano head made out of a few pieces Oak. A shaky setup, good thing Helicon is able to register the images so well.

Also shot 3 deep HDR stacks at each focus position, so a total of 15 images at each of the 4 pano positions. That's 60 camera images total. Lot of post processing, made somewhat easier by the way Helicon fits well into the Lightroom workflow. Would be nice if Helicon could just pick up a specified number of images at a time from a directory and batch process them without having to specify which images were in each batch.
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Stas Yatsenko
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Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

Thanks for the idea. Do you want Helicon Focus to monitor the folder? Or to select only images that were not yet processed? And congratulations on the great panorama.
tived
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Joined: 18.09.2010 16:07

Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by tived »

Batch processing of images would be really handy, have a look at Photomatix, and their Batch processor for HDR.

There you can specify the number if images in the HDR stack, and process, something similar could be done here (and just to add to it a bit, do panoramic stitching, hdr and focus stacking) yeah I know, not asking for much :-)

Henrik
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Stas Yatsenko
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Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

Usually every new stack is places in a new folder, so this type of batch processing will not work. The images for focus stacking are very similar and the only criterion to split them to stacks is the time difference between shots, which is not very reliable. BTW, you can add several tasks to queue and process them all later.
35degsouth
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Joined: 12.10.2010 02:41

Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by 35degsouth »

Hi Bill, Love the image. Can you inform me of the approx focus distances to get overlap of depth of field.
John
sh1
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Joined: 22.11.2014 20:01

Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by sh1 »

Hi there,

Just wanted to ask a quick question about the order of your workflow.....I have just taken up photography and have started shooting multi row panoramic images, however, much of the time I need to bracket for exposure and focus stack. Is there a preferred method for processing such images (ie, first focus stack all the like exposures and then HDR or HDR for each focus point and then stack at the end. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

SH1
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Stas Yatsenko
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Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

I would suggest to do focus stacking first. You will probably find useful menu\Enqueue stack command which can split combined stacks into substacks and process them in batch mode.
billfing
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Joined: 13.05.2015 02:24

Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by billfing »

Hmm.. Interesting.. How do you deal with 'ghosting" on a landscape such as bush, leaves, etc..?
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Stas Yatsenko
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Re: Focus stacked landscape pano

Post by Stas Yatsenko »

With focus stacking automatic deghosting is not possible. HDR stack contains the same image but with different exposure, so the program can exclude pixels that fell out out general rule. In focus stacking, each layer contains different image, the program is never able to guess if the pixel has changed due to focus change or due to movement of the object.

You can try to HDR stack first with deghosting and then do focus stacking. Just remember that Helicon Focus requires images of the same size as an input.
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