Panorama and focus stacking - Worflow

[Manuel Franquelo]

Dear all,

I've got a series of works that require panoramic imaging + focus stacking. I need to find a suitable workflow (software wise) for them.

- I would really appreciate some suggestions about how to approach this kind of workflow.

This is what i've already tried:

Solution A: Autopano + Ptgui + Zerene Stacker  // By order

1. Load photos into Autopano (stitch them and export to panotools)

2. Load exported panotools file in Ptgui

3. On the create panorama tab, render X panoramas with its focus plane, this means that we will have for example 5 panoramas of the same object, each containing its focus plane for further merging.

4. Merge panoramas on Zerene Stacker (Helicon focus cannot take huge panoramas)

5. Results on Zerene Stacker with Contrast method are not very pleasing... they've got some artifacts with triangular shapes which require heavy postprocessing. 

Solution B: Helicon Focus + Ptgui // ""

1. Focus stack the whole depth in each individual image of the panorama before stitching the panorama

2. Load images onto Helicon Focus, detect piles of images and merge. 

3. Actually batch processing in Helicon Focus is broken according to their forums, so this workflow is useless without batch processing, it would take too much time. (I havent tried CombineZ yet)

4. Stitch each fully-focused image in Ptgui

5. Render

Solution C: Autopano + Ptgui + enfuse // ""

1. Stitch everything in Autopano, export to Ptgui

2. Open in ptgui

3. Configure enfuse plugin in plugins menu (path)

4. Copy this simple command line for focus stacking according to enfuse's documentation:

--exposure-weight=0 \

--saturation-weight=0 \

--contrast-weight=1 \

--hard-mask \

5. Go to create panorama and select blend using enblend.

6. Process starts but ends up reporting an error:

no memory

cannot allocate these images..

Im using windows 7 64 bits 16gb ram and enfuse 64 bits.

7. I could load each stitched panorama with its focal plane into enfuse GUI, i havent tried this yet, but i read on some forums that it doesnt work as good as focus-stacking dedicated softwares.

Any thoughts, ideas or new methods for this ?

Thank you for your time,

Manuel Franquelo.

[Erik Krause]

Am 20.06.2014 14:03, schrieb Manuel Franquelo:
>
> I've got a series of works that require panoramic imaging + focus
> stacking. I need to find a suitable workflow (software wise) for them.
> - I would really appreciate some suggestions about how to approach this
> kind of workflow.

Depends on how you took the images, but I guess the best approach would
be to focus stack first and stitch then.

If you shot by changing the focus plane with the lens focus ring the
problem might be that the magnification changes. Zerene Stacker should
correct for this, but you'd need to make sure that you have the same
anchor focus plane for each stack (one image which isn't changed).

A second problem might be parallax. If you didn't turn the lens around
it's no-parallax-point you get parallax errors. This gets even worse
since the no-parallax-point might change with the focus. One way to
overcome this problems is to use a telecentric lens, where the
no-parallax-point is at infinite distance behind the camera, which
allows for parallel movement relative to the object.

The absolute specialist in this technique is Rik Littlefield, the maker
of Zeren Stacker. See his page for details (search for "telecentric" and
"stack & stitch"): http://janrik.net/RiksLinks.html

--
Erik Krause
http://www.erik-krause.de