First 'paid' stack- Louse claw

[Simon W]

Bought Zerene today. Once you pay for it, you start to take more care in editing!

This is a stack of 40 pics, 20x Apo with 2.5x photo adapter, brightfield.

Quite alot of work in editing the stack, but I started to get quicker with the controls and workflow. I did learn that I should have halved the focus increment spacing! At these magnifications, the depth of focus is tiny, especially with such a deep subject.

You can see why these creatures are so difficult to remove..


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Simon W
EOS 5D Mk 3; Olympus BH-2; Zerene Stacker
Melbourne, Australia

[Charles Krebs]

Very good Simon.

A 40 image stack of a subject like this through a microscope is not all that easy.

[Simon W]

Thanks for looking and the reply Charlie. Yes, I was pleased that the stack was fairly stable, it proved that by not touching the camera at all, vibes are minimized. Most of the shots captured the right focus points, but I did notice the odd hair that had missing focus overlaps. But was chuffed that I actually understood the basics of what images to select to touch up.

Has anyone ever done a video or narrative of a real hard stack edit? I still get confused how to prioritise or notice what part of each picture to touch up. Basically I used Cntrl/shift S with each shot and applied the better focus image where it was missing. I even fixed some ghost images/missing hairs. Takes a long time though, god help me with a 90 stack one!

I might do an instructional video, once I get better.

If you think I've made a little progress, that makes my day!
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Simon W
EOS 5D Mk 3; Olympus BH-2; Zerene Stacker
Melbourne, Australia

[rjlittlefield]

Simon, I'm sorry I missed this thread earlier. Regarding videos, I suspect you've already looked at them at least once, but be sure to review the retouching tutorials available via http://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/docs/tutorials/tutorialsindex I suspect that both of them are relevant to what you're doing. In general, the most useful trick I know is to render with PMax and use that result as an indicator of where detail has been lost from other results. Once you know where to look, by s-flashing against the PMax, then you can use the shift-mouse trick to quickly navigate to the appropriate source image and decide whether to retouch from source or retouch directly from the PMax output. In many stacks I end up never using individual input frames as source for retouching, but instead just touch up a DMap output from PMax output.

--Rik

[Simon W]

Thanks Rik, I'll give that a look. I have to admit that pmax confuses/scares me, but I'll try. I've been distracted so this will be a good excuse to try another
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Simon W
EOS 5D Mk 3; Olympus BH-2; Zerene Stacker
Melbourne, Australia