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I liked this plant at a relative's house recently so decided to take a few pictures with my new macro lens to stack together. When I got back home, tweaked, and stacked, I was disappointed to see several blurry spots. What advice would you give for how to deal with them (presuming I don't have easy access to the plant to take more)? I'll leave that open ended. Thanks. — Rhododendritestalk | 05:24, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
@Rhododendrites: It's normal for a focus stacking software to produce such blurry spots when presented with a stack such as yours. When objects of different depth position overlap each other, the blur of one (the one out of focus) will bleed into the area of the sharply rendered object behind it. This occurs when doing the focus stack with moving the focusing ring on the lens or using a macro rail to move the entire camera forwards (or backwards) in increments. I'm aware of one technique that seems to solve this problem at the source: by building a special lens that has lens elements in front being held by the tripod, and lens elements behing which will be moved together with the sensor to do the refocus. On the software side, I found that Photoshop is not the best choice for doing focus stacks and it's prone to producing such errors. The best program I've tried is Helicon Focus, which also offers an easy to use retouching tool if you purchase the Pro version. Note, however, that as I explained earlier, blurryness will bleed into other areas, so you will find that some sharply rendered areas are made useless by the blur of other objects, so the retouching can only go so far until you enter that transition area. --Lucasbosch00:19, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
@Lucasbosch: Thanks. So I downloaded the trial version of Helicon Focus and tried to process the same images. The initial result seemed to me actually a bit worse than the Photoshop result. Mode C seemed to be the one that was recommended for images with lots of little changes in depth/detail, but the results were blurry in some areas that weren't in Photoshop, and several areas had little halos. The bigger problem was when the images needed more alignment work prior to blending (i.e. Helicon made kind of a mess of it; Photoshop was just not-so-great). I'm thinking that may be user incompetence, though. :) This particular image, however, was indoors, with a tripod, so no significant alignment was required (the other one I referenced was a plant outdoors, in the wind). The real strength of this software, to me, seems to be the retouching tool, which is great. Takes some time, and is easier with some images than others, but it's really strong. Curious as to your thoughts on the new version (uploaded over the previous one -- see image/caption). Thanks. — Rhododendritestalk | 04:42, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
Take this for what it's worth, and I hope people with more technical knowledge say something, but, here are my comments: I like the composition, but it's a bit noisy with some pixellation in the sky. Fix that and nominate for QI. I don't see this as an FP. -- Ikan Kekek (talk) 06:59, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
