Helicon Soft Forum

I mainly/totally use Helicon for deep focus bracketing, ie of landscapes etc. That is not macro

Full disclosure I also have other focus stacking software, eg Zerene and, of course, Photoshop.

My most recent experiments are with a Laowa 15mm macro, where my closest object is very close, and I’m focus bracketing to infinity.

The focus breathing on the 15mm is large and I’m guessing this is my problem in Helicon, ie it can’t cope with the alignment between images.

When I try in Zerene I have the same problem, eg clear ghosting and poor alignment

Whereas in Photoshop, although I may need to make local repairs, the overall stacking is better than Helicon or Zerene.

I wonder if others had any experience of deep focus, non macro, stacking; ie with lots of focus breathing.

Have you tried increasing the alignment limits in the Helicon Focus preferences - Autoadjustments? Set the vertical, horizontal and scale to their max. Probably don't need rotation. Probably just need the scale, for that matter. Let me know if that doesn't help you obtain a clean result, in that case we would like to look deeper into the problem.

Catherine

Many thanks for the suggestion, but even if I increase x, y and scale to the max, 30%, HF still can’t handle my stack.

i think the issue is the huge change in FoV, ie scale, between the near and far images, ie from a magnification of 1 to 0.

I think my only option is to try a bit of slabbing

Unless you have any other suggestions?

Cheers

Garry

Garry,

Slabbing could work if it is indeed the change in magnification that's causing the problem.

Could you upload your stack (in reduced resolution if you want to) to our private file storage so that we could study why it's not being rendered properly?