6/18/2023 0 Comments Zerene focus stacker![]() I have a focusing rail but it seems to be a bit flimsy so I haven't used it (bought it at a consignment sale). Someone mentioned somewhere about a software/computer driven gizmo that does the focusing automatically in preset increments but it sounds very expensive. It's been suggest to use LV, but even at 5:1 zoom-in, the flower is so much larger than the LCD view that I'd have to scroll all over the place to know where the focus was. I'm using the pre-L version of the Canon 100 mm f/2.8 and I would say that achieving very small increments of focus distance is extremely difficult. (the BG had very little detail - shot at f/2.8 - admittedly not enough DOF to get overlap for a stack). When I increased the contrast on the DMap, it seemed to "attack" the flower details first and had little effect on the BG until I really cranked it up. Mostly I use PMax because it has less artifacts.Īfter reading your post and the link, I tried the same images again using both 15 and zero settings for contrast - the zero version had slightly fewer artifacts in the small petals although the difference was so small that I didn't notice until I switched back and forth several times.īUT - the DMap image was essentially not usable - well neither was very good - the PMax was the least bad. I shot an eleven image stack yesterday of a yellow dandelion-like flower (about the size of a small dandelion), and both methods produced junk, especially the DMap. I've always struggled to get anything useful from the DMap process no matter what the contrast setting was, and have essentially resigned to using the PMax output (I probably should just to the one stack). BTW, what is Melissa (too many questions for a Saturday morning - it's still am here - we're three hours behind you)? Well that was and interesting lesson (DMap) and many thanks for the replies on colour space and Zerene. At f/9, I probably could have made do with fewer images, but I always try to err on the side of too many, because too few means starting all over. The original images were ISO 200, f/9, with a 100mm macro lens. I thought this is a good example of why Lightroom and Zerene make a very powerful combination for focus stacking. It took just a couple of mouse clicks and a few seconds. I just selected the first image and synched all settings to the new image. As a result, the history was 29 steps long! You can return to any adjustment and adjust again. Because LR is a parametric editor, there is no harm in redoing any adjustments at any time. Now I had the basic image I wanted, but I did not have the edits. Then I used Zerene's retouching tool to paint the entire background from the top-most image, to get it more blurred. So, I stacked again (I still had the TIFFs), dropping one or two from the back of the stack. I could only shave off one or two, so the stack would still have the background too much in focus. However, I looked at the images, and I found that I needed almost as many just to get the farthest point in the flower in focus. I wanted more blur outside the main flower. The detail outside of the main flower is distracting. You pick the image from the stack that is "correct" for each area and paint from it to the composite. I used Zerene's retouching in a few spots where the stacked image had halos from parallax. I wanted the entire open flower in focus, and I thought I should keep a few of the star-shaped unopened ones in focus too. I rarely need to use a pixel editor for these, but if I do, I move the image to photoshop.Ī few days ago, I created this image, which is a stack of 20 images. Stack in Zerene, retouch if needed (more on this below) export as 16-bit TIFFs, still in proPhoto RGBĥ. Examine at 100% to see which images in the set are needed to get the desired DOFĤ. I thought this example might be useful.ģ. ![]() ![]() There have been a number of threads recently in which people asked about focus stacking.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |