Helicon Soft Forum

Hi,
I just came across your application recently and tried it out on a shot that I had been working on, a penny used to measure tire tread wear.

This image shows how things looked when the center of focus was on the penny, [http://smith-nelson.com/helicon/Tire_an ... 20norm.jpg] penny sharp, rapid focus falloff fore and aft.

This image shows the combined images using Helicon Focus, [http://smith-nelson.com/helicon/Tire_Pe ... con%20.jpg] the tire looks great but the penny is a bit soft.

This image shows the previous Helicon image with the original penny maske into the shot.[http://smith-nelson.com/helicon/Tire_an ... con_ps.jpg]

I shot eleven steps of racked focus.

I haven't ever posted photos to a forum so I hope that I'm doing it correctly.

My question is why did I lose the crispness of the penny in the Helicon process?

These shots were made with a Hasselblad H1 with a 120 makro lens @ƒ16 and an Imacon 528 back. All done on a G5 Mac.

Thanks,
Scott Smith

Scott,

Helicon Focus determines the best focused plane to use in the resulting image by measuring the contrast of the image areas. It looks like the glared on the penny even unfocused on other images create quite high contrast which is interpreted by the program as details. So the program merges focused and unfocused penny.

Ok, now to suggestions:

1. Avoid glares. This will add more texture to the penny and will help the program to find the best plane.

2. Do not make too many shots. Focused areas should overlap but they should not repeat on several images.

3. Use Opacity maps to show the program which plane should be used for the penny. You need to create Opacity map for the image where penny is well focused and paint the penny area with pure white. This should help.

We are now working on the next version of Helicon Focus which will be released in a month or two. It will give much easier tools to fix such kind of artifacts.

Best regards,

Danylo