Helicon Soft Forum

Can HeliconFocus handle files that have been tone mapped in Photomatix? I read that such tone mapped files have 32 bit channels. I also read on this site:

"Helicon Focus supports JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PSD and various RAW formats with 8 and 16 bits per channel."

Does this mean that I won't be able to do focus stacking on HDR processed images? I suppose I could do the focus stacking first with Helicon and then do HDR processing later, but I read somewhere that is not recommended "because if your focus stack is different at each exposure (the stacking app cannot segment the underexposed or overexposed scene well) then when you HDR merge the stacked images, you could potentially get artifacts where the exposures differ due to the stacking errors"

?? Thanks.

You can first merge to HDR, then focus stack. Alternatively, you can focus stack first and then merge results to HDR image. I am not sure which method will give better results.

It is true, Helicon Focus currently can only handle 16 bpc images, it is sufficient even for HDR images though we understand that true 32 bpc precision would be more reliable.

how good is Helicon at focus blending under- or over-exposed areas?

The algorithm selects the most focused pixels from all layers and it does not depend on image brightness. So theoretically it should work fine in shadows and hightlights too. We have not tested this in practice so your feedback is welcome.