Helicon Focus supports JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PSD and various RAW formats with 8 and 16 bits per channel.
It's a bit like a manual version of the 'variations' tool in Photoshop. Dmap can be a bit of a mystery so I have a heap of different preset settings set that I run as a batch job overnight and then use the best parts from each in the final image. Permutations are a bunch of Dmap combinations of all or some of the PMax slabs at different settings.Next: stack PMax substacks overnight on DMap.I usually have an overlap of about 50% between slabs, this seems to give me the separation that works for me. More detail means smaller slabs and longer processing time. Decide on the amount of images to blend in the slabs by looking at the trickiest areas and the amount of detail overall.I personally use ZereneVS but great things are said of the other two as well.
Shooting a stack is all well and good but a stack on its own is a rough instrument that doesn't always give the cleanest result for only a certain horizontal section.
Substack Slabbing Focus Stacking Walkthrough 1 ➤ The focus stacking workflow 2 ➤ How to prepare a focus stack 3 ➤ How to shoot a focus stack 4 ➤ Software tools for focus stacks 5 ➤ Postprocessing tools for focus stackingįirst, a word about slabbing, also known as substacks. Various methods can then be used to make the final outcome of the focus stack better during the following post processing stage. Thanks for your help and reply.Focus stack processing is the act of taking your separate images and combining them into one unified whole final image. I will work on them again and compare my results to yours.
I have tried a couple of yours and had decent results. Perhaps, as we discussed in PMs, have a go at one of mine where you have both the original and what I made of it to give you a starting point. I think you may have picked a particularly tricky example. Using Method B (and Method A) halos can often be reduced by increasing the Radius parameter, say to 30 or beyond. Method C produces the sharpest results can produce difficult to handle halos. Method A tends to produce soft results (but handles colours better).
You are also getting some crossing areas where the front spine is somewhat transparent and you can see the spine behind it through the front spine. And there are lots of crossing elements (the spines) in your example. I demonstrated this from about 21:55 in this video at You Tube. The further they are apart the more likely the front one is to have halos. The problem arises where there are elements of the subject that cross in front of one another and you want both the front one and the rear one in focus. However, that is the sort of subject where one sort of halo can be particularly problematic. I'm having difficulty with that subject working out what are halos and what are out of focus spines in the background.