Helicon Soft Forum

If you graphed focus by depth, a single shot would have a ramp up to a peak, followed by a ramp down. Like the peak of a triangle.
A focus stacked image would have a very steep ramp up, followed by an ideally flat plateau, then a steep ramp down.

This can produce an unnatural looking transition. (See attached photo).
I'm looking for ways to make the transition more gradual. Is there a feature or technique in Helicon that will do this?

Programmatically, I could see using the sharp pixels of images near the boundary as masks, but transferring pixels from input images that are increasingly distant from the mask source image as the boundary is approached.

Thanks!

The transition is controlled by the "smoothing" parameter. However, I'm not sure that is a problem with your stack, it looks to me like you have a bit of halo, I would try eliminating that first.

That is not the most helpful response. Is the smoothing parameter not in pixels, or is it another unit?
I am talking about something different than how the sharp parts of source images are combined.

And the image I sent you was just a sample to illustrate the issue, no need for condescending critique.

My reply was meant to be neither critique nor condescending. You asked a question, and as far as the developers understood it, the answer is the smoothing parameter. You also attached an example image, and I couldn't see that it relates to the question. Which may very well be my fault that I'm not seeing it, but it is what it is.

The smoothing parameter is in some arbitrary units, it's not precisely in pixels.