Helicon Soft Forum

Hello,

I am using a trial version before purchase. Seems I am encountering a problem - see attached, enlarged to 100%.

Helicon Focus worked great with my first try with a general landscape photo. Handled wind blown cactus stalks far better than Photoshop. But with this non-moving tree trunk I encountered trouble. Not sure what happened, can you help?

I am using a Sony a900 24MB camera and zoom lens - about 80mm, firmly mounted on a tripod. The 7 stacked photos are 16 bit tiff files, 139MB each. Over 50% of the processed images contain random burring like this. Not noticeable at 25% enlargement.

Of course I am new to the program and all settings are default "Method B (Depth Map)." Photos were photographed and loaded with focus near to far.

Thank you for offering a trial version to test.
Anthony Howell

Anthony,

I would suggest you set lower value for Radius and lower value for Depth map feathering in the Preferences. I would appreciate if you upload source images (jpegs) to our server (as described at http://www.heliconsoft.com/ftp.html) so we can test them too.

Sorry, not luck playing with the settings. Lower settings created less of a blur but more generalized over a larger area. Please let me know what you find from the jpeg files I ftp to you in the "AnthonyH" folder. I am using 16bit tif files.

Thank you,
Anthony Howell

Anthony,

Thanks for the images. They clarified the problem.

Method B requires that the images are shot in consecutive order. The focusing plane should move steadily from shot to shot in one direction with roughly equal steps. This is not the case with your images. So I suggest to use method A for this stack and change shooting order for the next stacks.

Thanks Stas,

Sorry for the trouble shooting for depth of field in stacks is new way to photograph, at least for myself.
Absolutely no reason not to purchase. Great program and support. Only thing left to do is, go out and shoot more photos with an enlightened technique.

Anthony Howell