HF and CZM combo a winner

Shooting in macro mode, techniques, tips & tricks
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BrianS
Posts: 39
Joined: 03.09.2008 15:00
Location: Melbourne, Australia

HF and CZM combo a winner

Post by BrianS »

Dan and others,

I've been helping Nancy (peteschick) with her work with sea shells. Thought you might like to share something I've found.

It seems that her biggest single problem was (is) significant variations in exposure, I suspect due to (fixed !) lighting fluctuations (which I have yet to solve - very strange). These could range up to 1/3 or even 1/2 stop (similar to) even though camera settings had not changed.

The result was some horrendous halos around major edges, and softness in subtle areas.
So..., thought I'd try using CZM to pre process them just to balance brightness/ colour, and perform 2 pass auto alignment, output them as movie frames 100%, and then present them to HF. (used method A 4/4 as Method B was inferior in both instances)

Wow - check it out. What's going on here?

Dan I much prefer HF and am happy I purchased it, but are there any lessons here for improvements to HF?

For me this will be very useful for my difficult diamond shots.

Cheers
Attachments
Improved-JPG-CZM-HF-Forum.jpg
Version produced by using the same improved versions, that had been first processed in CZM - balance brightness/colour and 2 pass align only
(100.04 KiB) Downloaded 1510 times
ImprovedJPG-HF-Forum.jpg
Output from original stack, that had contrast improved to help HF (the unimproved was much worse!)
(127.25 KiB) Downloaded 1510 times
BrianS
Posts: 39
Joined: 03.09.2008 15:00
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Update to last post

Post by BrianS »

Dan,

Just noticed that in HF preferences-Auto adjust I had brightness set to 0%, which would not have hurt HF considering the exposure/brightness variations.

Changed this and redid the test, also using highest interpolation 16x16.

Whilst the result using the original images was much better, the result using the CZM brightness/alignment pre processed set was still clearly better.

Brian
Dan Kozub
Posts: 355
Joined: 24.03.2004 18:14

Post by Dan Kozub »

Brian,

Thanks for the tip. I will check how the latest version deals with brightness adjustment. Can you upload this stack to our server ? (http://heliconsoft.com/ftp.html)
BrianS
Posts: 39
Joined: 03.09.2008 15:00
Location: Melbourne, Australia

Uploading now

Post by BrianS »

Hi Dan,

have started uploading to a new Folder called NancysShells. Expect it to take a couple of hours - about 200meg

2 zip files loaded, with 35 jpgs in each (no great difference in using these compared to the tiffs, which would have taken for ever to upload)

File names describe their lineage DPP_####-LR jpgs were produced from tiffs from output from CR2's in Canons DPP, which had contrast (clarity) tweaked and a little sharpening done in Lightroom - then exported to 100% quality jpgs.

Improvedjpgs-CZM#####.jpgs, are these same jpgs above that were then passed through CZM, global brightness and auto align 2 pass only.

HF settings were the same for both sets, MA, R6, S4

Thanks

Brian
fzf5bl
Posts: 2
Joined: 19.12.2006 17:39

Post by fzf5bl »

I have been having the same problem.Photoshop has not had this problem.
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