Helicon Soft Forum

I am interested in using your tool for panoramic photography of landscapes. Can your tool do image registration if the images w/ a different focus have very slight difference in pan or tilt?

There are two scenarios I can imagine,
1. I could re-shoot the same entire panorama (20 images or so) 3 or 4 times changing the focus a total of 3 or 4 times
2. I could change the focus 3 or 4 times each time I would pan or tilt the camera for 20 positions.

The first scenario doesn't sound so bad, I already do this on a regular basis changing lighting for interiors between re-shooting the same panorama. The second scenario sounds too painful, It would require changing focus 80 times. If you have a feature like this I imagine it would be useful for a casual user as well, they might get away w/ handheld shots.

Just thought of another question.

What happens w/ focal length? I know that every time you adjust the focus of a camera that is subtly adjusts the angle of view of the lens. What happens when you render the composite, does it use the widest angle shot or the most telephoto?

The program uses the first image in the stack as a base image and aligns all other images accordingly.

You can change the order of the images in the Helicon Focus and reprocess the stack.

I think the question is if you are creating a horizontal panorama of say three images at three focus depths, should you acquire the three left most images first, the central next, the rightmost last, then run HFocus on the first three, the second three, the third three, then use the panorama software to stitch the three H Focused images.

Or should you run the panorama software first then run H Focus on the three stitched panorama shots... if you did it this way, could H Focus handle the likely fact that the images would probably be less perfectly overlapped.

I think you'd better process images with HF first and then with panorama.

Otherwise HF can have problems with registration of images.