Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
I decided it would make an excellent subject for focus stacking.
Specific Feedback
I had a great deal of difficulty with the blue tones on the undersides of the scales.
Is the overall focus sharp enough?
Technical Details
Shot with Sony a7iv, at 1/50 sec. F/3.2 ISO 600
Opened in LR then 9 images sent to Luminar AI for stacking.
Edited in PS.
Barbara, you’re right, this pine cone is a great stacking subject and you have a very good looking result, with detail throughout the cone and nicely soft surroundings. When I look at the largest view, I feel like there’s a slight lack of sharpness, which may be the NPN software, since your shutter speed is probably fast enough. Did you use a tripod? I also see some softness particularly in the rearmost scales near the top. Some of this softness looks to be from the fundamental optical limit, where when you don’t get both front and rear bits sharp in a single frame, you end up with a soft edge around the front part. (I gave an example of that in my NPN webinar on stacking.) I would suggest a retry using a tripod and more depth-of-field for a comparison. There’s also a fair amount of color noise in the brownish background, that can be fixed reasonably well in LR’s standard noise reduction or with the new LR AI noise reduction.
I’m not a stacking expert like Mark, so this looks fine to me, Barbara. It has nothing to do with the stacking, but it looks as if you selected the subject or background and ended up with a few selection anomalies around some of the edges. The subject selection tool doesn’t like acute angles and narrow gaps and I haven’t figured out how to change it’s behavior yet, so when I have something this complex, I"ll do it with my pen tablet and an old Topaz masking tool where I have more control.
A very pretty subject! I don’t know your stacking software but f/3.5 is thin ice for any closeup subject, and especially one where sharpness is the desired outcome. I think you should try it again at more like f/11 (which should be excellent with your full-frame sensor) and see if you get a different result.
I don’t know if the camera has focus stacking – if not, be very careful to keep it rock-solid and increment focus manually on the lens, and use a remote release.
I like the BG but the bottom of the cone feels cut out. Maybe go a little more natural on the lighting? If there was blue on the undersides of the scales, since that is the only blue in the image you should be able to use a Temp-Tint adjustment along with a simple global hue-sat adjustment on the raw file – but maybe that’s what you did. Color is best dealt with in the raw stage.
Barbara, this does seem like a good subject to try focus stacking on. I will have to remember that. I’m glad some of those that are good at stacking have shared their thoughts. One thing about it, the subject is still available, or another one just like it! I am impressed with your efforts. Maybe one of these days I will delve into it.
