HF “autoadjustments” preferred settings

[waldenk]

I am an experienced (and very happy) Helicon Focus pro user…and have been using the SW successfully for some time in conjunction with my Stackshot rail, and few different macros lenses (Laowa, Mity, etc) to shoot insects in an indoor/controlled lab setting.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with shooting insects outdoors, in the wild, handheld (with high speed diffused flash).
I’ve discovered that HF is extremely good at correcting frame-to-frame subject movement… with the HF autoadjustments (horizontal, vertical, rotate, scale) set up to about 10%.
Question: Is there any reason -not- to leave these adjustment parameters set liberally like the above…even for extremely well-aligned lab-shot sequences? Is there an image quality penalty of any kind when these parameters are set high?
And related: If anyone has experience with handheld extreme macro stacks, is there an HF focus stacking parameter (A/B/C) that others have found works well for stacks in which the images may not be shot in perfect front>back order?
thanks!

[Catherine]

There is no penalty in image quality (or anything else) if you increase the autoadjustment range. However, if your image has a regular repeating structure, like a mesh, then in some cases the software may get confused and align different cells of the mesh with each other instead of the same cell if you allow it to search far enough (by increasing the adjustment values), i. e. align with an offset. It is rare, but that's why the default values are not larger.

For your work that is probably not a concern.

[waldenk]

hi catherine,
perfect.
this is exactly what i wanted to know:)
thanks very much for the quick reply.