![]() I tend to call this a ‘bin’ after video editing software. The software tells you in big letters across the screen how to get your images into the program. Instead, let’s get the images into Helicon Focus where the main work is done. My use of Helicon Remote is discussed in the video at the bottom of the page I won’t linger on it here. I don’t have a motorized setup, so I couldn’t test this feature. I understand that even if I were using my Canon MP-E macro lens (a wonderful macro-only lens with no autofocus), Helicon Remote can control motorized macro rails. This isn’t a macro setup (1:1), so I could use the camera’s focusing mechanism. My camera was tethered to the computer, letting Remote do the driving. In this instance, I started with Helicon Remote. Being able to drop in your raw images makes life easier and gets you faster into the work of making the “real” image. What if you’re shooting with one of the 50+ megapixel cameras? You would shoot a stack of, say, 20 images and then have to convert them all to TIF before you can import them into your chosen focus stacking program. Of course, it retains the ability to use your camera raw files (no need to convert to TIF or jpg). I am incredibly impressed with how much Helicon Focus has improved since I first used it. Recently, however, I was preparing to be a guest lecturer for a college class to demonstrate focus stacking, and it seemed only fair that I should take another look at Helicon Focus. But I was successfully using the other software and Photoshop to stack my images. Time passed, and I don’t even remember why I first switched. It was good, and I used it for a while, then switched to another program. So to me, it's more than worth the price.Several years ago, when I first began photographing feathers, I tried some software called Helicon Focus. It seems like exactly what I'd expect from a dedicated tool vs the more general processor: it's faster, more effecient on resources and gives me noticeably better results. Even if the quality were the same, I'd buy it for the speed and convenience improvement, as well as the ability to save as DNG, but the image results are better as well. It'll be my normal processor moving forward. Is Helicon Focus worth having? My decision was yes, and I've bought a license. Overall, I'd give the Photoshop result a 7.5 of 10, and the Helicon Focus a 9. ![]() I expect it could be ignored, but I'd probably want to try to clean that up a bit. Interestingly, both of them have very slight halos around the yellow flower at the bottom, evidently a rendering artifact from the blurred version in the later images in the stack. Overall, both images are good, but I think the Helicon Focus image is a bit better. I like the colors better, the purple flowers on the left are much better, and the yellow center of the flowers on the right are brighter and sharper. The Helicon Focus in general is brighter and seems sharper to me. Overall, I prefer the Helicon Focus image. The end result (exported as a JPG) by Lightroom: As soon as it finished saving the image, Photoshop crashed (whee!).ĭuring processing, Photoshop grew to take up over 16Gb of memory, and made the system unusable for anything else, something I've only seen happen on this machine while rendering 4K video. After flattening the image, I saved it as an uncompressed TIFF file, which was a 166Mb file. Processing the image took:Ĩ minutes for Photoshop to import the images and be ready to work on themĤ minutes to flatten the image for saving Not the most powerful model but it's pretty well built out. My current computer is a fairly recent iMac 5K, with a 3.8GHz i5, 25Gb of memory and a Radio Pro 580 GPU. Once that's done, in Photoshop, you select all of the layers and run Edit->Auto-Align images followed by Edit->Auto-Blend layers choosing the stacking option. Photoshop creates a file and loads each image into a separate layer. This fires up Photoshop and hands the 45 images. To run the Photoshop test, I select the 45 images in Lightroom and then choose Photo->Edit in->Open as Layers in Photoshop. That's actually pretty good, but there's some sharpness falloff on the flowers to the right at the back.
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