Helicon Soft Forum

Ii don't know if this is possible, or if Helicon and Cognisys could work together to find a solution.

I am using Stackshot3 to obtain a series of focus-stacked files. The subject is photographed with a 40 image series, it then rotates 10 degrees and another stack is shot. This continues until a full 360 degree rotation is completed, for a total of 1440 images. The entire set is stored on an external drive in a single folder. What I would like is that a new folder is automatically started at the beginning of each stack, so that the contents can be used by Helicon Focus. I know that Focus can be told to look in a folder and automatically work on successive groups, but this doesn't work because the Stackshot system randomly fails to fire about 1-2% of the time. The result is that some stacks only contain 38/39 shots, which means all later stacks have the wrong set of pictures. The only solution is to manually inspect the contents of the folder and create 36 subfolders containing the right images, a slow and tedious process.

I'm not sure how you're even using Helicon Remote for this, given that it only supports a single movement axis.

The movement is still all controlled by Stackshot, as is the shutter release. Remote is used to adjust the camera, and to determine where the images will be stored.

I see. Didn't think the remote shutter release from Stackshot would work while USB remote control is active.
Until we add support for multiple stepper devices so that everything could be done from Remote, the only thing I can think of is to add pause between stacks in Stackshot settings (if at all possible), and split by time in Focus.

Stas Yatsenko wrote:I see. Didn't think the remote shutter release from Stackshot would work while USB remote control is active.
Until we add support for multiple stepper devices so that everything could be done from Remote, the only thing I can think of is to add pause between stacks in Stackshot settings (if at all possible), and split by time in Focus.

That works beautifully. I have been able to run a 12x8 grid, with each step taking 50 shots. Focus separated the 4800 images into 96 folders and then focused reach of them.