With this image I am looking for technical advice on how to improve upon Photoshop’s focus stacking.
This is an unedited focus stack of 2 images: one focused on the flowers, the other focused on the mountain. I set my aperture to f/16 for each.
From a distance it looks good, but if you zoom in to the flowers and foliage you’ll see blurred landscape beyond - like a buffer - and then see the landscape beyond that is in focus.
I would like to know how to eliminate or reduce those blurred parts so there is little to no blurry transition from the sharp flowers to the sharp meadows and mountain beyond. As it stands now, this image is not marketable.
Do you recommend a mask to paint in the focused landscape around the flowers?
Another technique?
Other software?
I’d appreciate whatever advice you could offer. Thank you!
What focal length lens were you using. With a wide angle I would think that two exposures at f/16 would have been enough. My best advice is too late for this photo and that is to take at least 3 exposures just to be sure. I would just mask it and brush it it manually. But obviously that will only work if you had enough dof with the two exposures. You can’t recover something that’s not there. Did you check the mountain exposure to make sure it’s sharp in the middle ground? If it is then I would def try a manual blend.
Just a quick check on Photopills with a 35mm lens focused at 500 m you should have enough dof down to 15’.
Matt, I use Helicon Focus as my go to stacking SW. It has 3 difference modes to combine the photos and you could try all 3 to see if one will do a better job. Michael is right, you can’t produce what is not there, but since you said you can manually brush in from the distant focus, that seems the thing to do if PS won’t give what you need. Just strong suggestion in the future, check DOF from a calculator for your lens and apperture to see for distance to subject what kind of overlap you can expect. Photopills is one but there are others and some are aps that you can cary with you on your phone. If you use Helicon focus and put in the starting shot (near) and final shot (far) and the apperture, it will calculate and tell you what step size and how many shots you need to shoot to cover the distance. I have used it mostly with my 105 Nikon “Micro” lens for shooting flowers to get sharp images over the depth of the flower while keeping the background a blur by keeping the apperture wide. Works great and if you hook up your laptop to your camera the program will even shoot and move the focus for you automatically. Have used PS also and it can work well. I have got to the point where I can pretty well judge how many shots I need to stack and move the focus manually without resorting to real-time camera control by the SW. I just collect and stack later and if you start shooting with stacks you will gain confidence in you ability to judge how many shots you need. Good luck and good stacking! Oh, and if you look under Macro/Flora, I posted one image of a tiny flower (about 1/2 inch in height as I recall) with about 80 some images stacked - controlled automaticaly by my laptop using Helicon Focus. Of course when you shoot a lot of images of something soooooo tiny, patience is imperitive as even a slight breeze can cause bluring, but if you have the apperture open wide, you get more light and hence can shoot faster. Also, Helicon Focus can correct for a selected amount of translation and even rotation of the object - so that can help a lot in alignment of the stack.
That’s really excellent information, Greg. Just the kind of advice I was hoping for. I’ve checked out PhotoPills’s DOF calculator since Michael mentioned it and I’ll put it to greater use in the future. I’ll also look for HF to see how much it is. Any place you’d recommend for purchase?
I know what you mean about learning through repeated use how to judge for yourself how to set the camera for stacking. Nothing beats experience.
BTW, I’ve owned the same 105mm Nikon lens you cite for some 20 years and it still does an incredible job.
Matt, another strong vote for Helicon Focus for focus stacking,. I use it for both landscape and macro. IMO it provides significantly superior results to Photoshop. And NPN’s own @Mark_Seaver recently did an excellent webinar here at NPN where he covered Helicon in depth (primarily for macro, but the principles apply to landscapes too).
The other huge advantage to Helicon is that it can output the blended image as a DNG file, allowing you to continue to make non-destructive raw adjustments in Lightroom to the blended shot. This leaves you a lot of creative choices in your workflow.
In the scene you presented here, I think it would require 5 to 7 focus bracket shots minimum to get the best results, no matter what software you used.
You buy Helicon directly from the vendor Heliconsoft.com. I believe NPN even gives you a discount coupon, check with @David_K. Helicon can be used as a plugin to Lightroom, or as a standalone.
Ed, Thanks for suggesting HF - I checked it out and it appears to do what I want to do with advanced technology and simplicity - at least that’s the way it reads on the website. I’ve seen it cited many times on NPN so I gotta believe if it is no more difficult to learn and use than PS and LR.
I agree that the capabilities to work within LR and output as DNG are strong selling points. I’ve never enjoyed having to output a TiFF when I blend LR and PS workflows.
@David_Kingham - am I eligible for an NPN member discount?
In terms of it’s application for landscapes, it is much easier to learn and use than LR or PS. If you watch Mark Seavers webinar, you can see it gets more complicated for macro, where the DOF challenges are way more extreme. The biggest issue with Focus Stacking and landscapes is if you have ghosting, where something moves in the shot between brackets. Flowers blowing in the wind in the landscape are an example. Helicon has tools to deal with this, and that’s where there is some learning curve. But for pure static landscapes, it’s actually pretty simple to use.
Matt, what you’re seeing is a limit from fundamental optics. If you have overlapped items and you want both of them in focus, you must get them in focus in the same exposure, otherwise when the area further away is in focus, the foreground item(s) are blurred and occupy a larger area that when they were sharp. The way Photoshop masks those areas in a stack makes fixing or at least improving those areas extremely difficult. Helicon does a better job, but still can’t overcome fundamental optics. The small blurred areas can be cloned in Photoshop but it takes a very small brush working at very high (like 2:1 or higher) magnification.
@Mark_Seaver - when you explain the optics like that I get it so thank you for your feedback. And your description of the cloning work in PS that I’ll have to do is exactly what I have visualized. I’ll check out your webinar for more information.
Hi Matt, I bought HF directly from the company - just go to their website. You can complete the transaction there and then they will provide you with info on how to download the SW. Easy, peasy.
Will HF work with files other than Nikon and Canon? The descriptions on B&H says it supports those 2 camera manufacturers.
Also it states that it’s a plug in to Lightroom. Does that mean that once purchased you will get free upgrades to match the Adobe upgrades? Or that you will even get upgrades to HF?
Igor, I can’t say if it will work with other camera manufacturers for sure, but I think it will work with TIFFs as well as raw from Nikon which I shoot (and I would be pretty certain Canon raw also). Why don’t you go online to the HF website and see how they specify which camera brands of raw it will work with. And if you don’t find it, send then an inquiry or call and speak to someone in the Pro department at B&H to see if they know. Usually pretty helpful.
As far as updates - lifetime for free if you buy their top of the line product. It’s so easy to use with LR. After I sync the stack for lens corrections in LR, I simply export them to HF by selecting HF under the LR file menu and the stack is sent to HF for combining. You select the method (A, B, or C) and click on render and it goes to work, when done you select save and when done, exit brings you back to LR where the stacked image is placed automatically. You can do further processing there as you wish.
You’ve already gotten some great advice, but I’ll add another plug for Helicon Focus. In my tests, it did significantly better than PS, but I’ll also second Michael’s advice of generally always taking at least three shots instead of two.
A Lightroom plugin means you can export bracketed images directly from LR to Helicon, and then the finished blended file is automatically re-imported back to your LR catalog. I believe that any raw file supported by LR will work in the Helicon LR plugin, including the ability to output a DNG file for the blended image. You are purchasing a perpetual license for Helicon, so you get free upgrades to Helicon and it’s LR plugin. This is independent of anything Adobe does to LR upgrades. I assume if Adobe did something that required Helicon to modify their software, that Helicon would issue an update, in theory for free.
I’ll send you a pm with the code 