Helicon Soft Forum

Does your software blending degrade the original sharpness of the original pictures at all? Because some frames might be nearly as sharp as others, I would think the opportunity to fool the software would be very high.

This is a very clever piece of software. Thank you for making it.
Can you say a little bit about how it works?

Are you going to sell this to photoshop? Or maybe they are making their own version?

Wow, I haven't notice that in my usage of it. If anything, I'm seeing far sharper images and more WOW factor in my shots with this than by using DoF and aperture. Post Helicon sharpening in Photoshop is far more effective also than with images straight from the camera.

Please note that I am referring to the parts of the final blending vs. the same parts of the chosen element. Certainly the over all result is fantastic. I am asking if up close, does each part of the blend always get the best part of every element? Sometimes mine do not; they "miss" by a little, and then i have to go back and clone in a piece of the element into the final blend. But not very often.

Yeah, I understand what you're talking about. I get the impression that it doesn't degrade the original images any, in terms of what gets included in the final product, but it does miss occasionally, especially when there is a pretty wide range of focus "slices". I've also noticed though, that a lot of it has to do with how many slices I make and how good I control the focusing. I've noticed that as my technique in taking the original stack of pictures improves, so does the output image.

Still want to hear from Dan on this please

We do no sharpen or blur original pixels. But the result is always a weighted average of two or more planes. If you set smoothing to zero you will see the extreme case. In most cases it is not optimal while seams between areas and program errors are very noticable.