Specific Feedback Requested
Any critique or comments are welcome.
Technical Details
Is this a composite: Yes Focus stacking with Zerene Stacker
Canon EOSRP, Canon Macro 100mm, f2.8
The soft lighting is perfect for this flower. The delicate pink isn’t overwhelmed which is easy to do in bright light. The focus and the stack looks good. I didn’t see any halos or artifacts. I’d rather see the main subject separated from the flowers behind, but maybe that wasn’t possible to do. Magnolia trees are so stubborn! Nicely done and really speaks of spring.
Nao, I really like the gentleness of this view. I also like the oof flowers in the background and the color shift. This stack is much better, looking good in the large view. In the largest view, there are some areas of missed focus, particularly in the leftmost of the top three petals, where there’s softness in the middle of the sharp areas. Yes, that’s me being picky. It’s your choice to go for “perfection” or to enjoy what works for you.
I’ve annotated a few areas on your picture to make it clear what I’m talking about. The green arrows point to sharp parts, the red arrow points to softness in the middle of those sharp areas. The green arrows point to what I call “overlap artifacts”. These are places where the laws of optics mean that the only way to get the missing bits sharp is to have both the front and back bits sharp in the same frame. This happens because when you focus on something close, the parts behind go out of focus. Then when you shift focus to what’s behind, the front part goes soft and it gets larger. The result is a small area around the front piece that is never in focus. These missing parts can only be fixed in post processing using a clone tool.
Kristen, thanks for your warm comment.
Mark, thanks for your thoughtful advice. It’s particularly precious and useful for me, because I’m studying focus stack all by myself. I lost some detail by DMap. They say DMap is good for keeping the original smoothness and colors, but lose some detail. I’m wondering which method is better for this kind of photos, DMap or PMax.
Nao, that’s a very beautiful flower - often magnolias look a bit messy when open, but this is different. I also like the contrasting colour of the background. When you get comments like Mark’s (also very useful for me) then you know you have made very big progress!
I like the soft, gentle feel to the magnolia blossom. Have no suggestions for improvement. Nice as is.
Nao,
Lovely flower well captured. I agree with others on color and lighting. I like the light pink on the petals and intense pink in the middle, all with adequate details. Stacking done well, although Mark’s comments are very discerning. I do manual stacking, so I start from the front and go all the way to the back of the flower. I would crop the left edge slightly to remove the dark background along the edge. Yes, It would have been preferable to have some separation from the background. In those cases, I usually use a shallow dof but that would require a lot more images. I use Zerene stacker also. I have rarely used DMap, as it creates some artifacts, but almost always use PMax. PMax creates crispy images but with some noise.
Very lovely!! I agree with the crop from the left but other than that, the BG works for me. It’s nice to see a subject stacked to be sharp and still have a soft BG.
It looks like the left edge of the light petal on the left of the center is also a bit soft, probably due to it being just ahead of the first frame’s focus plane. Aside from missing some areas, stacking always seems to have artifacts to deal with. I always do PMax and DMap and stack the two in PS and often mask one to reveal a better area in the other. Them some cloning is often called for.
Deciding on the best slider position in the DMap rendition is ESP to me, and sometimes I’ll try several.