Helicon Focus 7 Download [HOT]
Velia Blacksmith
Recently, toward dusk I spotted two 1/8thinch leaf-hopper insects in the process of mating, positionedbutt-to-butt. For a few minutes the insects cooperated by beingparallel to my digital plane, allowing me to get fairly good depthof field, but the insects then moved, and I was stuck with eitherhaving a portion of one insect in focus, or a portion of another.Try as I might to reposition myself to get parallel, a difficultprocess with the intervening foliage that might shake and alarmthe insects, I just couldn't get the right spot. Then a lightbulb went off -- I did have the Helicon Focus filter and I coulduse that! Duh!!!
With that in mind, I shot a series ofsix or seven images when the insects were still, focusing fromthe wingtips of the nearest insect amd rolling the focus alongwith each shot until I ended with the antennae and forelegs ofthe insect furtherst away. Each shot showed only a small areain focus, but the Helicon Focus filter blended them seamlesslyinto a final shot that was, one, in complete focus and, two, hada larger image size than I could have obtained when I tried toshoot both insects parallel.
After photographing flowers, mushrooms, spiders and water drops, I now had 30 sets of image captures made to support my experiments with focus stacking. The first thing I did was to process the same sets of image captures in Helicon Focus software and Photoshop. In many cases one did a better job of merging the slices than the other, and occasionally neither product was able to cope with the elements in the composition.
The cluster of mushrooms at the bottom of the composition (detail A) was a challenge for both Helicon Focus and Photoshop. The three mushroom caps overlap and the moss in the background is rendered in focus since the focus slices extend to include the other cluster of mushrooms. Both have a halo around the edge of the mushrooms that meet the background moss. Helicon Focus (both methods) has less of a halo, but would require some serious editing to use as a large print.
Detail B below shows Photoshop provides a very good composite image of the overlapping mushrooms with nice detail and good separation from the out-of-focus background. Method A of Helicon Focus shows a halo at the top of the mushroom cap, and the detail is lacking due to the somewhat muddy looking colors of the mushroom cap.
Helicon Focus did not do well with the first mushroom focus stack but performed much better on other mushroom images taken on the same day under similar conditions. The camera was moved closer to capture only the top cluster of mushrooms. Although the aperture remained set at f/14, moving closer reduced the depth of field of each capture. Helicon Focus Method A (below) did the best at assembling the composite images with very few anomalies, and the background was a nice soft rendering. Photoshop did very well also but had a few areas (red circle) where the layer selected was not the optimum sharpness. The locations this happened in this image would have been fairly simple to fix by adding the image with the best detail as a layer to the composite, and mask in the proper sections. Helicon Focus Method B had the worst result with strange green bands and a background that was nearly psychedelic.
Another instance where the use of focus stacking has great benefit for me is when I want a foreground subject sharp, and the background softly out-of-focus, as in the example of the spider and web. I captured six sets of images and Helicon Focus had a difficult time with all of them due to the movement in the spider web, and exacerbated by variations in the lighting.
Photoshop aligned and merged the four captures in this stack, and the only anomaly in the image is circled above. It is a section of out-of-focus web that shows larger than the web in focus and somehow gets chosen as being sharpest. This was easily corrected by erasing the section of the out-of-focus web from two focus slices then merging. The misalignment in Helicon Focus was partially solved by aligning the images in the stack with Photoshop, saving each layer as a new image file, then combining them in Helicon Focus. This process worked well with some of the rattlesnake orchid images, and while Helicon Focus assembled the spider correctly (image not shown), it still had trouble with the spider web in some locations.
At first I was mystified by the haloing effect, but since Photoshop and Helicon Focus were exhibiting the same effect in the same places on the image, it was likely not related to the software processing. In fact it is an optical issue. To prove this to myself I set up an experiment with a subject that could be arranged so that one part of the subject overlapped a more distant part. I chose a branch of berries from a tree growing in my yard. To avoid some of the problems associated with subject movement or changes in brightness, I set up two analog lights indoors, placed the branch of berries in a clamp, and set the camera on a tripod. I also used the Helicon Remote software to control the collection of the focus slices. The closest and farthest points of focus are set in the software, which calculates how many focus steps can be made between the two settings. The user has a choice to reduce the number of captures, but I collected the maximum; I could always eliminate slices from the stack. Capturing the images in this way eliminated some of the sensitivities of the Helicon Focus software which are that the slices should be roughly equal in steps, should be the same brightness, and should be aligned perfectly.
When a subject is out-of-focus it appears as an ill-defined projection of the subject. When the focus point is on a background subject, in this case the stem, the berry is out-of-focus and extends beyond the in-focus berry. When the focus is on the berry, the stem is out-of focus. The area adjacent to the edge of the berry near the stem is impossible to capture in sharp focus, or at least without the out-of-focus foreground image overlapping. The images below were captured using the Helicon Remote acquisition control software with the camera set to an aperture of f8.
Neither Helicon Focus nor Photoshop, or any other focus stacking software, have a chance of correctly capturing and merging images of this type due to the optical phenomenon of the out-of-focus foreground subject making it impossible to get in-focus background subjects adjacent to the foreground subject. The examples below are crops (blue outline) of the full frame image above. The Helicon Focus and Photoshop composite images all fail to render the berry complete, although the Photoshop rendition is clearly closest to complete. Both methods in Helicon Focus appear to have difficulty in selecting the berry parts early in the process select slices that are more out-of-focus than optimum. They also exhibit significant halo around the berry and below the stem. The fourth image is a copy of the Photoshop image layered with two of the slices that include portions of the berry near the edge and the adjacent one toward the front. The image requires additional editing on and near the stick, likely layer masks, to completely correct the red color halo on the stick. Similar editing can be done on the Helicon Focus images using the included Retouching tool although it would most likely require some work using the masking capabilities in Photoshop.
There may also be a benefit to shooting at smaller apertures, and more exploration in that direction is needed. The images below are Helicon Focus processed, one set captured at f/2.8 and the other at f/8. The image comprising slices taken at f/8 are clearly better as expected; the out-of-focus blur should be smaller at a smaller aperture. For this composition editing the f/8 image would be manageable as the only difficult areas are between the berry and the stick. For a more complex image, such as the rattlesnake orchid, editing may be very extensive or even impossible.
Photoshop and Helicon Focus both have their strengths and weaknesses based on my observations. Shooting for focus stacking requires planning, just as photographing panoramas and multiple images for High Dynamic Range processing require planning. The images must be captured with the processing method in mind. For focus stacking, the best results will be had when the camera is on a tripod, the subject does not move, and the lighting is constant. This pretty much defines an indoor setting. However, much of nature is outdoors, where the light can be variable and the subject may move even though the camera is rock solid. While Helicon Focus generally does well at putting the image stacks together, added benefits are the Helicon Remote control of the image capture process and a sophisticated retouching tool. Photoshop provides the ability to align images in the stack that might be offset from others prior to stacking and can handle brightness variations between images in the stack, and I belive I will have some uses for this technique.
First, a brief explanation of what is shown in the slideshow. The first frame is Photo No. 1 of 63 from the focus bracket, edited to make it black and white. The last frame in the slideshow is Photo No. 63 of 63, shown in full color.
Notice the focus ring on my Canon Macro lens is set for infinity [highlighted by a green rectangle]. The distance between the front of the Canon lens and front of the Raynox close-up filter is 54 mm, based upon guidance from Rik Littlefield.
Since the smallest increment on my NiSi NM-200 manual focus rail is 10 µm, I divided 175.89 by 10 in order to determine the number of increments to turn the larger adjustment knob on the NM-200. The answer is 17.589 increments. For simplicity and safety, I turned the knob 15 increments between shots.
The preceding composite image was created using Helicon Focus to focus stack 99 JPG photos taken automatically using my Fujifilm X-T5 set for AUTO FOCUS BKT. The composite image was created using unedited JPGs straight out of the camera.
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