On 4/10/2015 5:42 PM, Eric Weir wrote:
Thanks, Mark. Very helpful. I’m impressed with your dedication. I think I’ve
shot a lot of images when I’ve shot a few hundred.
It's more like wild abandon than dedication! :-)
I would have assumed that stack focusing would require each image to
near-identical to the rest—same settings, same camera position, same framing,
etc., etc. Am I mistaken? When you talk about “moving in” to “cover the depth
of field,” it sounds like I am. I’m amazed that you were able to do that
hand-held.
You do have to try to align as tightly as possible but the stacking
programs are also pretty good at aligning images. Even images that are
more than a little off kilter can be stacked successfully. When you do
that the quality around the edges of the frame suffers. You can get
patterns around the edges of the image or even a "pinched" look to the
whole image, with some significant blank spots. I try to leave ample
working room around the subject so that I can crop out the edge
distortions if needed. I just looked and the images I shot earlier this
week, cropped to a more or less square format, range from 3030 to 4140
pixels in dimension, with most in the 3200 to 3300 range. Since the K3
files are 4000 pixels in the short dimension that means that at worst I
had to crop out about 1000 pixels. At best - the stacking process
apparently grew one of the images by 140 pixels (I didn't know it worked
like that....)
The bigger challenge is movement of the subject in the frame. The
dangling stamen in the harbinger of spring photo is good example - it
drifted all around as I took the stack of images. Here is what the stack
looked like without intervention:
http://www.markcassino.com/b2evolution/index.php/stacked-stamens?blog=9
To fix that I simply erased all instances of the stamen from the images
to be stacked, except for the one I wanted to keep.
Do you do stack focusing in Lightroom or is that a Photoshop-only technique?
I only use Photoshop so I don't know if lightroom supports stacking or
not. There is a freeware program called CombineZP that works very well,
though the interface requires some patience.
Of the photos I posted one was stacked in Zerene Stacker and the rest in
Photoshop. I routinely use both for stacking and cannot yet predict
which will work best in in any situation, with the exception that
Photoshop on my computer chokes on really heavy duty stacking projects -
100 images or more - which is not something I have tried often.
Mark
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