Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Dozen and dozens of these blue violets have popped up in our lawn … bringing a bluish look to the lawn.
Spring’s First Blooms - whatcha’ think?
Macro with stacking
Violets are one of the first signs of spring. They are hard to photograph because of their shape. This is a good look at this pair. The addition of the bit of “fluff” in the upper left works well to add interest in that part of the frame. It does look like the tips of some of the petals are just a bit soft, plus there’s haloing around several petals. Those halos are a standard stacking artifact that happens when you have both front and back sharp, but not in the same frame.
Thank you Mark. Is there a way to rid the photo (future photos) of the haloing effect? Is that inherit in the stacking system or can something be done about that?
An excellent image, Taiyo. I too like the little bit of fluff (probably dandelion) in the upper left and I think the stack worked well. When I’m taking pictures of low growing plants, I tend to do a little clean-up of the surroundings (particularly dead stuff) that might be a distraction. That’s just personal taste, but something you might consider.
To get a response from @Mark_Seaver on the stacking issue (and he is the guru for that), use and @ sign and you’ll see a list of all the people who have been commenting (and yourself) on this post. Click on his name and he will get notified that there’s something he should address. To answer your question, if you don’t let your camera do the stacking internally, but use an external application, you can edit the stack. In PS it’s a bit of a pain because you have to go down the stack of individual layers and find the one you want, then use masking to bring it to the top. If you use an external stacking program like Zerene or Helicon Focus, you can edit the stack easily in their software while viewing the final image and an individual slice side by side. You simply find the one you want and paint the in-focus area in with a brush, so it’s quite intuitive.
Thanks Dennis, i use Helicon Focus for stacking images and know what you speak about. I’ll redo the image and see if i can remove those haloes. More interesting to me is that i didn’t see them until Mark pointed them out. The usefulness of this club is obvious … much thanks to All.
Taiy0, there are several ways to get rid of (or at least minimize) those halos. The one way that’s a sure thing is to have enough depth-of-field so that both front and back bits are in focus in the same frame. The Helicon C (pyramid) method minimized the halos. Finally, you can go in to the stacked result and use your processing software to clone sharp, adjacent areas into the halos, which can be a lot of effort… You didn’t say what your f-stop was, but since everything from front to back looks sharp, you could have gone to say f/16. Those halos occur because as you shift the focus into the “distance” what was in front goes out of focus and gets larger, leaving you with a blurred area hiding some of the sharp rear feature…it’s a challenging explanation, but if you look through you lens and adjust focus between something in front and and something in back, I think you’ll see what I’m trying to explain.
Taiyo: Neat little scene and a solid comp and capture. With images having this much detail a larger post would be so much better. This one is only 644x750 pixels and site guidelines recommend as much as 2000 pixels on the long side. I’ve actually found the remove tool easier to use than cloning when cleaning up halos. I also use Helicon and tend to render in A, B and C mode and pick the best result. >=))>
Thanks Bill. I used the guidelines of 1500 pix on the long side so am surprised it is only 750 pix on the long side - wonder how that happened. And i agree that a larger post would be better.
