Critique Style Requested: Standard
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
It was actually a May shower, but maybe that’s close enough. Another shot from yesterday.
All comments welcome!!
Another focus stack, holding my breath in between zephyrs. Minor tonal sliders in LR, then into Zerene to stack and PS for some BG work.
Hi Diane,
I think you really hit the mark in the highlights on this one!
Curious, how many images did it take for the stack?
f5 is pretty shallow but not knowing the distance or the magnification, it’s hard to tell how many it would take.
Either way, I’m not noticing any stacking transition marks but then Zerene is famous for doing a good job “as long as it has good images to work with”.
The subtle highlight in the BG on the left helps me to know where the supporting branch is and keeps the flower from seemingly float, but just barely. The implication of it works though! 
The leaf tip poking out, the color, texture, details, and those waterdrops! NICE!!
I just looked at ours today and they’re too far gone, I missed my chance at those for this year.
Thanks, @Merv! Once I get the stack done I never keep track of the number. I start out with a reasonably good guess at the number of steps to cover the DOF needed, depending on the aperture and spacing of the steps – using my favorite calibration tool – ESP. I always start the stack by backing off focus just a bit from the closest part, because sometimes I miss it. (The camera needs to be in AF but I’m on back button focus so I can start the focus wherever I want with the focus ring. This is almost too good to be true!) So I delete the first few until I’ve reached the close point, and then delete the ones that go too far.
So, guessing, at f/5 I probably had the minimum step size, or one notch over. The DOF is pretty flat here so maybe about 15 steps. Electrons are cheap so no penalty except download and processing time if you go for more than you need.
But I have issues with this one that I should have mentioned up front. I love the flower itself and the big drop, but the LR corner of the BG bothers me, as does the flat color and tonality. I’ve already done some cloning of the branches there and there probably isn’t much color info to pull out, but I could bend the colors. The use of Select Subject and hitting the QM icon to refine it will give me a clean BG to work on.
We may even have a bit more gentle rain in the next few days… This is a once-every-several-years opportunity for these flowers. Somebody please explain to my husband why breakfast may be late. The only chance is as soon as its light enough and before the breeze comes up.
Thanks, Diane
That’s the method I use as well with the exception of AF, my camera doesn’t have focus bracketing so it’s MF and a focus rail.
I tend to use f8 as the widest opening since that’s where my 90mm macro lens starts showing it’s sharpest aperture. Then I use a DOF calculator to determine the step distance (circa 50% overlap).
I haven’t used Zerene yet but that’s next on my to do list. I’ve watched several videos on the process so I feel I have a good understanding of it so far.
I’ve done a few landscapes with 3 to 5 images that were stacked in Ps (Lr first, then Ps), that worked very well but large numbers of images is a bit much for Ps IMHO.
The BG doesn’t bother me at all, it’s mute and natural looking and any added color depth might detract from the flower in my view. The color, saturation, contrast and detail of the flower is more than enough to draw all the attention away from the BG. It’s well balanced in my opinion.
I have issues when the BG competes with the subject but that’s not the case here.
Thanks for the information and the response, Diane
Ted, Please excuse Diane for being late with breakfast, it’s Mother Nature’s fault! 
More Coffee?
Granola Bar?
@Merv, stepping focus by tiny amounts works well, but I’ve read that a focus rail doesn’t, at least for Zerene. It expects to correct for focus breathing, and a rail gives a different effect – something to check out.
PS will stack well when you have a smooth change in focus, as in a landscape – visualize shooting along a sidewalk at a low angle. But if you put a flower pot halfway into the scene, PS won’t do a good job of working around the OOF halos of the plant against the BG sidewalk as the focus shifts. That’s the strength of Zerene and Helicon Focus – dealing with overlaps. It can take some parameter tweaking to get the best results in difficult situations, but the defaults are generally good. The best thing is to keep the aperture at a middle level, which you are doing.
Diane,
I was pretty worried when you cautioned me about using a focusing rail system with Zerene, I thought that I must have completely missed a very limiting part about Zerene!
I didn’t feel I had missed something that significant during my initial research but maybe I had.
As a result I started my research again but this time looking for limiting factors with using a rail. I wound up contacting Zerene about it and thankfully they reassured me that there’s no limitations with a rail system, in fact they informed me that they first came out with their software in 2009 and it was based solely on using a focusing rail system.
They even recommend using an automated system called StackShot Macro Rail Sytems <<Link.
They went a step further by saying that a rail system is the most accurate and reliable way because there’s less missed or rejected images (that part may have been a marketing or sales pitch though).
The StackShot Focus Rail System can be tethered directly to Zerene so no need for downloading in that scenario, it’s all automatic if you want and it sounds like most labs use that method.
Helicon Focus also recommends StackShot as well as WeMacro.
As far as I can tell, Canon first introduced their in-camera focus bracketing feature in 2018.
I think Nikon introduced their version in 2018 and they call it focus shift rather than focus bracket.
Panasonic released theirs at the end of 2017 or early 2018 I think.
Sony just started with their A7RV, if I had known, I would have bought one of those instead but I’m not really interested in trading up this soon.
What this means to me is that Zerene came out with their software a few years before in-camera focus bracketing became a thing, they may have modified it for in-camera focus bracketing images but they haven’t changed the way it handles images from focus rail systems.
I don’t know where you read that but it’s not accurate.
Anyway, I’m just happy to know that I can use my rail with Zerene, especially since I’ve already spent the time and money to make one.
Thanks!
Thanks, @Merv – and my apologies! I don’t know where I got that information and it would be old at any rate. You’re much better at research than I am!
Before in-camera bracketing many people just incremented with the focus ring – needs a delicate touch but works well.
