Help with focus stacking, newbie

[Matt Rosing]

I'm new with using hugin. I'm using 2024.0.1 with the simple interface. I have two photos taken with a 85mm prime lens. Both photos were of mostly the same thing. In the foreground is a bunch of icicles hanging off a roof and in the rear a hundred yards away is a grove of aspen trees with no leaves. This seems like a really hard problem because there's nothing in focus in both images.

Using the simple interface I loaded the two photos, aligned them using the default and created the panorama with the focus stacked option. The alignment is partly correct in that it figured out that the two images are slightly rotated and shifted with respect to each other but what it didn't figure out is that this lens creates a bit of focus breathing, or the focal length of the lens changes a bit based on focal distance. So, the image focused on the foreground has a slightly higher focal length. The result is that the background is in focus and some of the icicles in the center are okay but the ones far from the center are pulled from the far image and just blurry. I changed the interface to advanced and, the best I can tell is that there are no control points. I don't know. I tried the advanced option from the start and got control points but the result was no better. I read the tutorial referenced in the help section under focus stacking by Pat David and the result of the alignment was "After control points pruning reference images has no control points"

Any suggestions?

[Bruno Postle]

Hi Matt, yes Hugin will let you use a different angle of view for each shot. Then when it aligns the images it will calculate this angle of view for you.

So in the Photos tab, right-click on either of the photos and create a 'new lens' (this tells Hugin not to link lens settings). Then, also in the Photos tab, Optimise > Positions and View, and re-optimise the alignment.

Fell free to share your photos or results.

-- 

Bruno

[Matt Rosing]

I tried. The results are not impressive. Here's the link to a google drive folder with the input and a few outputs.

close.tif and .jpg is the up close image.   far.tif and .jpg is the far image. I used the tif files.

simple.tif is the result of just doing the simple interface. Given that the camera was on a tripod it sure seemed to have cut out a lot.

advanced.tif is the result of doing the advanced interface. I have no idea why it twisted the images, didn't leave me with a square image and still cut out a lot.

try-lens.tif is the result of using the advanced interface to load the files and decrease the fov for the near image. I just guessed. I then used the simple interface to align and stitch the images together with the focus stacking. I did use the panorama editor or whatever it's called to get the image square. While this is the best version, there are still a lot of shadows around the trees from what I assume is the blurry part of the trees from the near image getting pulled into the far image. Is there an obvious fix for this?

Clearly, I have no idea how to use the advanced interface but the simple one just doesn't work for these photos. Is there something that describes what the simple interface does at the advanced level, as a way to learn this interface? So maybe I could start there and then be able to ask some slightly more intelligent questions.

Thanks

[David W. Jones]

I'm curious to see that I can do with it, but we're missing the link to the Google Drive folder...

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[Matt Rosing]

Sorry about that. Hopefully this makes it.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17xqytTtxG9-zreMvtDNmjPon70fgW_vM?usp=drive_link

[David W. Jones]

That made it. It's been awhile since I did a focus stack, will see how it goes.

That close image is LOVELY!

On 4/9/25 19:37, Matt Rosing wrote:

Sorry about that. Hopefully this makes it.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17xqytTtxG9-zreMvtDNmjPon70fgW_vM?usp=drive_link

On Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 6:57:31 PM UTC-6 GnomeNomad wrote:

I'm curious to see that I can do with it, but we're missing the link to the Google Drive folder...

On 4/9/25 14:13, Matt Rosing wrote:

I tried. The results are not impressive. Here's the link to a google drive folder with the input and a few outputs.

close.tif and .jpg is the up close image.   far.tif and .jpg is the far image. I used the tif files.

simple.tif is the result of just doing the simple interface. Given that the camera was on a tripod it sure seemed to have cut out a lot.

advanced.tif is the result of doing the advanced interface. I have no idea why it twisted the images, didn't leave me with a square image and still cut out a lot.

try-lens.tif is the result of using the advanced interface to load the files and decrease the fov for the near image. I just guessed. I then used the simple interface to align and stitch the images together with the focus stacking. I did use the panorama editor or whatever it's called to get the image square. While this is the best version, there are still a lot of shadows around the trees from what I assume is the blurry part of the trees from the near image getting pulled into the far image. Is there an obvious fix for this?

Clearly, I have no idea how to use the advanced interface but the simple one just doesn't work for these photos. Is there something that describes what the simple interface does at the advanced level, as a way to learn this interface? So maybe I could start there and then be able to ask some slightly more intelligent questions.

Thanks

On Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 3:10:04 AM UTC-6 bruno...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Matt, yes Hugin will let you use a different angle of view for each shot. Then when it aligns the images it will calculate this angle of view for you.

So in the Photos tab, right-click on either of the photos and create a 'new lens' (this tells Hugin not to link lens settings). Then, also in the Photos tab, Optimise > Positions and View, and re-optimise the alignment.

Fell free to share your photos or results.

-- 

Bruno

On Tue, 8 Apr 2025, 07:46 Matt Rosing wrote:

I'm new with using hugin. I'm using 2024.0.1 with the simple interface. I have two photos taken with a 85mm prime lens. Both photos were of mostly the same thing. In the foreground is a bunch of icicles hanging off a roof and in the rear a hundred yards away is a grove of aspen trees with no leaves. This seems like a really hard problem because there's nothing in focus in both images.

Using the simple interface I loaded the two photos, aligned them using the default and created the panorama with the focus stacked option. The alignment is partly correct in that it figured out that the two images are slightly rotated and shifted with respect to each other but what it didn't figure out is that this lens creates a bit of focus breathing, or the focal length of the lens changes a bit based on focal distance. So, the image focused on the foreground has a slightly higher focal length. The result is that the background is in focus and some of the icicles in the center are okay but the ones far from the center are pulled from the far image and just blurry. I changed the interface to advanced and, the best I can tell is that there are no control points. I don't know. I tried the advanced option from the start and got control points but the result was no better. I read the tutorial referenced in the help section under focus stacking by Pat David and the result of the alignment was "After control points pruning reference images has no control points"

-- 
David W. Jones

[Matt Rosing]

Thanks. I was looking at that again and the close image really stands on its own. I think the combined image might be too cluttered. 

That said, I'm still trying to figure out how to use this tool. The images seem to be projected onto a sphere, then aligned, and then projected back to a plane. That makes sense if the images are part of a panorama but these images are mostly on top of each other and I had to do a bunch of roll, yaw, and pitch of the resulting image and I have no idea why.

Matt

[David W. Jones]

On 4/10/25 14:39, Matt Rosing wrote:

Thanks. I was looking at that again and the close image really stands on its own. I think the combined image might be too cluttered.

What I've managed to produce so far is too cluttered. The massed detail of the trees overpowers the icicles.

That said, I'm still trying to figure out how to use this tool. The images seem to be projected onto a sphere, then aligned, and then projected back to a plane. That makes sense if the images are part of a panorama but these images are mostly on top of each other and I had to do a bunch of roll, yaw, and pitch of the resulting image and I have no idea why.

First time, I tried using Hugin's align image stack function. That failed with an error. I think the focus in the two images is so far apart it can't find any control points between the two.

Second time, I loaded the images, went to the GL preview window, and ran the Assistant. It gave me an image with the icicles very sharp and the trees all blurry (because that's how they are in the close image), even using the Exposure fused from stacks output.

Third time, I gave the far image a second lens, ran the various alignment steps, and came up with - an image much like what I got the second time.

The fourth time, I added a mask to the close image, drawing one to include the biggest of the icicles. That produced an image with that icicle sharp, and nothing else improved over the previous images. While you could go through and mask everything you want included in each image (icicles from close, trees from far)... that's a lot of work and I'm not sure it would produce anything like what you want.

Fifth time, I removed the mask and set Hugin to output remapped images. Then I fed them to enfuse using a command line based on what I found at this URL:

https://macrocam.blogspot.com/2013/09/using-hugin-for-focus-stacking.html

That produced an image combining the focused trees with the focused icicles. Well, the icicles are sort of focused. There's an odd, ghost-like sort of look to them, like enfuse sort of fused the in-focus icicles with their out of focus versions. But it's enough to reinforce the likelihood that an image combining the two would be cluttered and crowded.

So I think it could be done, I don't think it should be done. The close image looks to me like a much stronger image than the far image. In the far image, the icicles just look like mistakes, that you were trying to get a picture of the sun-lit trees, and the icicles are just in the way.

I think this is one case where doing an actual painting combining the two images could make it work, but even then it might look cluttered.

The focus stacking might work better if you have more focus layers than just two. Perhaps images with the two dark stumps in the snow are in focus? Well, maybe not. I see they are in focus in the far image, while the trees themselves aren't as sharp.

Maybe you could try it with a pinhole could come up with enough depth of field to get it all in focus?

Matt

On Thursday, April 10, 2025 at 1:56:55 AM UTC-6 GnomeNomad wrote:

That made it. It's been awhile since I did a focus stack, will see how it goes.

That close image is LOVELY!

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[Matt Rosing]

Thank you so much for trying to make this work. I've had a couple of crises pop up the last few days and haven't been able to respond.

I think the lesson I learned is there are limits on what this tool can work with. There are really no sharp point on the near image other than the roof and there are certainly no sharp points on both images. Further, the snow around the trees makes it impossible to figure out what is in focus on the far image and I suspect that's why the ghosting around the trees shows up.

[David W. Jones]

Well, I suppose you could try the old-fashioned way. Create a new image the correct size in the graphics program of your choice. Add the icicles image as one layer, add the trees as a layer behind it, and see if painting the areas you don't want in each image as transparent. That would eliminate algorithmic guessing at control points. Then try flatten and export it...

Similar to what could be done with Hugin masks, I think. But the focus in each image is quite far apart from the other, I think it would be tough either way.

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