Helicon Soft Forum

I'm going to be manually shooting focus stacks for each image of a panorama - landscape and indoors.

My plan is to shoot a separate pano row for each focus point - eg 1 row at closest focus, 1 row for next closest focus point etc. Then after uploading I'll arrange images into ordered stacks, create focus stacked images in Helicon Focus, and merge resulting images into a panorama in PTGui.

I have two questions -

1. Should the focus points be based on each separate image in the pano, or should they be at consistent distances for all images in the pano?

2. For a given aperture how do I decide the number and spacing of focus points?

If you follow your workflow, each focus stack is independent from others, so you can choose focus points as you like (use method A or C if focus changes are not sequential). As to aperture, it should be calculated with any depth of field calculators. I would recommend to rotate focusing ring by an equal step, say 10 degrees. By trial and error you can find the rotation angle which allows to keep everything in focus.
I would also recommend you to make focus stack for each position, and then move to the next pano position.