Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

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horshack
Posts: 15
Joined: 03.12.2023 18:50

Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by horshack »

For product-photography I use a white backdrop where I occasionally blow-out the background slightly in order to achieve the desired exposure on my subject. Even though the white backdrop is blown I'm able to bring it down in post and have the color remain white since only one or two channels is blown.

However for focus stacks I assemble in Helicon the highlight recovery no longer works - ACR/Lightroom renders the recovered highlights as pink. This is on an Olympus OM-1.

Here is an animated PNG I've created showing the highlight recovery of an individual exposure vs a 5-shot stack created by Helicon:

Image
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Catherine
Posts: 1850
Joined: 29.04.2019 23:38

Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by Catherine »

Hello,

I'm not seeing any visual issues on this photo. Are you exporting the result to DNG?
horshack
Posts: 15
Joined: 03.12.2023 18:50

Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by horshack »

Catherine wrote: 07.10.2024 09:56 Hello,

I'm not seeing any visual issues on this photo. Are you exporting the result to DNG?
Look at the pink color cast on either horizontal side of the subject in the second frame of the animation, as compared to the absence of cast in the first frame. This is a DNG exported from Helicon.
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Catherine
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Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by Catherine »

The color of the white background? Yes, now I see it. We'll need the source images to reproduce the issue, can you provide them?
horshack
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Joined: 03.12.2023 18:50

Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by horshack »

Catherine wrote: 07.10.2024 23:47 The color of the white background? Yes, now I see it. We'll need the source images to reproduce the issue, can you provide them?
Thanks. Sent you a PM with a download link.
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Catherine
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Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by Catherine »

Stack with the "Adjust brightness" option turned off in the Helicon Focus preferences - Autoadjustments. That seems to produce a good result.
We'll try to find out why this happens, probably some asymmetric clipping issue (one color channel gets clipped).
shutterbug
Posts: 68
Joined: 17.12.2022 15:14

Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by shutterbug »

Could it be a difference in colour profile?

By default Adobe uses "Adobe DNG" for DNG files and "Adobe Color" for RAW files which can cause differences. There's also often times a shift in White Balance taking place (especially when one didn't pay attention and use a fixed white balance setting for the RAW files) which could result in a difference in white balance etc.
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Catherine
Posts: 1850
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Re: Helicon brackets losing highlight recovery

Post by Catherine »

In this case it's not that.
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