I found Zerene Stacker after hitting the limits of what enfuse could do. It has been absolutely amazing for my artistic macro work, which I'm sure is no surprise for anyone here.
Today I abused Zerene horribly to good effect. I shot a focus stack of a portion of the Torah. I then retouched it so that only the key three words are in-focus while the rest of the shot is wildly out-of-focus. I ended up with the words seemingly floating above the parchment.
This is from Leviticus 19:18 and translates roughly as, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
This is very interesting! It shows a couple of effects that I do not fully understand.
First is that I agree it looks like the sharp text is floating above the blurred text. I sort of understand why my brain might be inferring that relationship, but I am still surprised how vivid it is. I think the alignment of some of the characters encourages that interpretation. I notice especially that two of the descenders intrude pretty far into the space of the line below them. In English typesetting, this could only occur if the lines were on different levels.
Second is that, frequently, the blurred text appears to me to be wiggling around slightly with respect to the one sharp line. Again, it looks like the sharp and blurred text are on different surfaces, and either the blurred surface or my personal center of perspective are wiggling around slightly. It does not do this all the time, but often enough to be noticed, especially since I do not notice any similar effect in normal daily life.
I think the alignment of some of the characters encourages that interpretation. I notice especially that two of the descenders intrude pretty far into the space of the line below them. In English typesetting, this could only occur if the lines were on different levels.
Rik,
I think you're onto something here. The Torah is hand scribed, of course, so it is common for ascenders and descenders to impose on the lines above and below. I carefully used the retouching tool to paint in individual letters from out-of-focus source frames, because I did not want to defocus based on a hard horizontal line.
