Helicon Soft Forum

Another try to gt used of Helicon Focus.
I put a simple white paper under the pencils.
I made a try with an aluminium sheet instead of the white paper and tried the stack with method C, 24 shots: the result is not that nice, the reflexion of the aluminium get the algorythm out of the way, the borders are not too shaped, the halos of the aluminium are a problem.
But with method B, white paper, less reflexion, it works fine.
So my conclusion is that method B works better when the lines of the different elements in the picture are simple lines (a flower is made of curves, a pencil is all straight) and the area is not too bright.
And this is a very important point: you can't ask Helicon to work fine in all the situation, you have to prepare the picture, it's like shooting a common picture: Photoshop will not get you in the way if the picture is wrong from the beginning...
My conclusion so far...

Overexposed areas are always a problem. I would recommend to avoid glare and overexposure by shooting with exposure compensation and using RAW format to preserve details in shadows.

Method B works best if there is no intersecting objects or abrupt changes of the surface. Method B is based on selecting the best source images. When objects are intersecting, there can be two or more sharp layers. Method C can handle this by simply merging all the information so that you do not notice the artefact. Anyway, the behaviour does not depends on straight or curved lines, it rather depends on how smooth the surface is.

Stas Yatsenko wrote:Overexposed areas are always a problem. I would recommend to avoid glare and overexposure by shooting with exposure compensation and using RAW format to preserve details in shadows.

Method B works best if there is no intersecting objects or abrupt changes of the surface. Method B is based on selecting the best source images. When objects are intersecting, there can be two or more sharp layers. Method C can handle this by simply merging all the information so that you do not notice the artefact. Anyway, the behaviour does not depends on straight or curved lines, it rather depends on how smooth the surface is.

Stas thanks for your reply.
This point is very interesting.
I'm still trying to understand how the shoot with exposure bracketing to see if I can get better results...

Yes, you can use Helicon Remote to combine both exposure bracketing and focus bracketing. You will need the to merge HDR in some other software and then focus-merge in Helicon Focus. Still I believe using RAW is a more practical approach in most cases.