Helicon Soft Forum

Hi.

I am using Helicon Focus mostly for landscape shots to get some nice sharp foreground against an also sharp background.

Helicon Focus continuously struggled when parts of the scene change when the focus stack is taken. Some common examples are:

- Wind moving gras or flowers
- Ocean waves
- People walking
- Parallax error from the handheld shot

Especially ocean waves completely confuse Helicon Focus. I have a high level understanding what the different methods in HF do, so I am not surprised this happens. At the moment, I just go in and manually paint over those areas with movement. I also tried tweaking the parameters, but usually this helps very little.

Yet, I wonder whether something could be done automatically here. Adobe has some automatic de-ghosting in it's HDR workflow which works reasonably well for example. For HDR the problem is probably easier since the depth of field doesn't change in the image stack. Still, there is a zoo of research papers out there about deghosting HDR stacks, maybe some of those could be used for focus stacks?

Or is this maybe the complete wrong approach for this problem?

Hi!

We have experimented with different correction algorithms, but weren't satisfied with the rate of errors/artifacts. We prioritize exact and correct processing of focus stacks. Most of our customers want results that are perfect, rather than "good enough", and this is what we strive to achieve for perfect stacks. Additional algorithms introduce additional errors, and there is a risk of also breaking good stacks when trying to amend bad stacks (the automatic detection is never perfect). We're trying to do the best job possible with deterministic algorithms, and provide retouching tools to fix the rest as easily as possible.