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Helicon Soft vs. Photoshop for landscape focus stacking

Apologies in advance...

Can some one point me to a thread that compares Helicon Soft vs. Photoshop for landscape focus stacking? Or if the thread(s) is not up to date, can I get opinions on which tends to be the "better" method.

Thanks,

J.D.
 

pfigen

Member
In my experience, in ALL kinds of focus stacking, Photoshop is way behind Helicon Focus, which in turn is behind Zerene Stacker. In actuality, Helicon works very well for most subjects and the ones where it doesn't perform well, Zerene ably takes up the slack. Photoshop's stacking, in a word, is a joke. It might work great on low res web jpegs but on high res images it just doesn't work at all. I mean, don't waste your time.
 

JohnBrew

Active member
I use Helicon and am happy with it. I recommended it to a landscape photographer friend who did a rather extreme study versus PS and concluded Helicon was no better than PS. He stacked 10 images for the comparison. I have never used more than five images for stacking and found PS lacked the finer algorithm which I believe Helicon has.
 

gmfotografie

Well-known member
i do focus stacking not often.
how you capture the images... with hard and software, or manually focusing?
how you decide how many frames you need for a sharp picture?
 

JohnBrew

Active member
Sorry, just now returned to this post. So i’ll respond to the previous question.
You can stack with separate images or use the multi-exposure feature of your camera. You can use manual or AF. What is important is to know the DOF of your f-stop, then you can determine how many images you need. And be on a tripod, of course :D

The great thing about focus-stacking is that it allows you to use the highest resolution f-stop for your particular lens (usually f4 - f8) to create an image which is sharp from foreground to infinity and avoid the artifacts created and/or caused by stopping down where diffraction rears it’s ugly head.

Hope this helps.
 
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