Extending DOF by stacking planes via Helicon SW

[Dennis]

Hello,

When taking close ups with our 60mm macro lens, we constantly run into depth of focus problems where the “top” plane of the image is usually in focus, but the shallow depth of field, even at apertures of F11 and F16, means that the “middle” and “lower” planes are out of focus. Stopping down to F32 doesn’t solve this and from what I understand, begins to introduce diffraction effects which may affect the image quality.

After reading a post on IIS about specialised software that can “stack” these “planes of focus”, I downloaded and installed Helicon Focus which has a 30 day free trial, a US $70 annual licence fee (for 4 years then lifetime) or a one off US $250 lifetime licence fee.

Here are the first results. Frames 1 to 3 were the input photos where I focused on different “depths” of the flower and the final pane is how Helicon assembled these. Look carefully at Frames 1 to 3 and you should easily spot which part of the frame is in focus, the remainder being out of focus. This was a very difficult test as the flower was swaying in the breeze so I could not keep it in the same position, and the foliage also moved between frames.

Cheers

Dennis

[ving (David)]

very cool demostration dennis

if kyou want a free proggy to stack macros try combineZM. i have downloaded it but havent yet had a chance to play.... i have had it for months

you are right about f32 and image degradation tho. my mantis shot (see forum) was shot above f48 i think and it has obvious degradation in it.

[Dennis]

Hi David

Thanks for that. I had a look at a review of both Helicon Focus and CombineZ5 at:

http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_72/essay.html

and it seemed that Helicon was the easier to use, so I downloaded it first and was sufficiently impressed such that I’ll investigate CombineZ5 further now, as I was initially put off by its steep learning curve, according to the reviewer.

Helicon can open my Canon CR2 Raw files as well as Photoshop PSDS files, which was quite nice. It also has a very easy to use user interface, although it really challenged my 4 year old P4 3.4Ghz with 2G RAM when crunching through the numbers.

Cheers

Dennis

[gary]

Hi Dennis,

Very impressive capability. Thanks for posting this.

Best regards

Gary

[joshman (Josh)]

very impressive indeed. a program i'll have to look more into.

thanks for the demo.