Helicon Soft Forum

I've been testing demo versions of Helicon Focus on my computer and Helicon Remote on a Samsung Galaxy S10 with my Nikon D850. I like Focus, but Remote has worked very poorly for me, and it did one thing that I disliked a LOT. If anyone has suggestions about any of these points, I'd love to reconsider, because SnapBridge is lame. Otherwise, I offer this as feedback to Helicon:

-I had endless problems connecting. Sometimes I'd successfully connect to wifi, but the app wouldn't recognize the connection. The only thing that helped more than once was turning off my wireless flash trigger until the phone was connected to the camera and the app recognized the camera. But it didn't help consistently.

-Most of the time I used the auto-recognized camera in Remote, but it didn't always work. When I tried to add the camera manually because the auto-recognized connection wasn't working, I apparently never got all the information correct, because the information Remote asks for does not match the connection information that my camera provides (I'm not an engineer, so I don't automatically know the meanings of all the words I'm seeing here).

-I wanted to take photos at one-second intervals to allow my flash to recharge, but ended up with staggeringly long pauses. I set "pause for flash recharge" at 1 and that didn't help. I let it default back to 0 and that didn't help. Adjusting interval settings didn't help either.

-There were times I was in the middle of shooting a stack and tried to stop. When I hit the "stop shooting" button, it stopped, but I could no longer do anything in the focus section of the app - it was all grayed out and wouldn't come back. So I had to close out of the app, and then spend an hour trying to connect again.

-Yes, I restarted my phone and camera multiple times during this process.

I'm a food photographer, and the appearance of food deteriorates rapidly after it's dished, so I don't have an hour to mess around with a shoot every time. I have minutes. So after a couple frustrating hours of trying to make the app work, I decided to do a shoot with SnapBridge so I could at least test those shots in Focus. That's when I realized - and THANK GOD I SAW IT - that the Remote app had changed my camera settings, taking it off of RAW, and NOT just while I was using the app. If your app is going to change my default settings, you need a big warning on it telling me I have to change them back when I'm done with it. Had I done an actual shoot not realizing it had made that change, it would've been a serious problem.

1. Some of the problems you've described are likely software issues fixed in the new beta version of Helicon Remote, please give it a try. For example, Wi-Fi connection should work automatically now without hassle: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/co ... conRemote2

2. When focus stacking, the minimum time delay between shots is about 4 seconds. It's not an artificial delay and it cannot be reduced further, but it can be brought down to 4 seconds if you're currently experiencing a longer delay.

"Pause for flash recharge" simply adds the specified artificial delay on top of however long the camera takes to execute the commands.
3. There are two situations when the app changes raw to JPEG: either you're running in limited demo mode (but you should be on a 30-day trial which is fully featured), and when you press "Preview" - previews are taken in JPEG. In both cases, the image format is only changed in the camera for the shortest possible duration and restored right after each shot. But if the app is terminated, or has crashed, or frozen during a shot and cannot restore back to JPEG, you can end up in such an unpleasant situation. One way to avoid is to not use the preview function. But hopefully, you will also find that the beta version works better and is more stable, to the point that it's no longer a concern.

Fantastic, thank you so much for your reply. I love Focus (faster, easier, better than Photoshop) and have been waiting to purchase the license until I know whether I should add Remote to it. I'll give your suggestions a try tomorrow and see how it works.

-Holly