Cactus Flower Stack – First Try

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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Roy Patience
Posts: 212
Joined: Sat Aug 05, 2006 12:03 am
Location: Sourthern California

Cactus Flower Stack – First Try

Post by Roy Patience »

Image

This is my very first try at stacking with Helicon Focus. The subject is the bloom of that is about two inches deep. The stack consists of 19 Basic JPGs (700 KB). Since I don't have any experience yet with stacking, I just plugged them into HF and saved the result.

Nikon D50 Sigma 28-80 at 80 mm. 1/200 at f/8
Lighting is diffused sunlight

Comments and critiques are welcome.

Roy

Charles Krebs
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Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:02 pm
Location: Issaquah, WA USA
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Post by Charles Krebs »

Roy,
Since I don't have any experience yet with stacking, I just plugged them into HF and saved the result.
So now you have some experience! :wink:

I'm not sure about the size of this flower, but I think you might be overdoing it with 19 images in the stack. I think this could be done with less. It might be interesting running every other or every third image. When you load the images in Helicon and you are at the Parameters/Run tab, if you "right click" in the box with the source files you will get a box with options. Third up from the bottom you can choose "Select", and that will expand, giving you the choice of selecting every second or every third image. You can do this manually with the "check boxes" as well). When you are starting out with all this sometimes it is good to try and develop a "sense" of how many image to include in a stack. It's really not bad to shoot too many. But after a point you do not gain anything in the final image, and you are doing more work and taking more time than needed. But it is much worse to shoot your stack with too great a focus shift between images (not enough images). In this case you will get out-of -focus bands in the final image.

beetleman
Posts: 3578
Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 4:19 am
Location: Southern New Hampshire USA

Post by beetleman »

A very nice first try. I was going to say you could use some more light in the interior but as I looked at it more, more lighting would have made the interior look shallow. The darker interior makes it look very deep and there is still lots of detail to look at.
Take Nothing but Pictures--Leave Nothing but Footprints.
Doug Breda

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