Beginner 1st attempt at bracketing and stacking, advice please.

[footman]

Focus bracketed in Olympus E-m1 Mkii and stacked in Photoshop. What's with the weird way the metallic base seems to fade and disappear into the next dimension?

 

[gremlin16]

Odd. It will be to do with how Pas has blended the layers. Have you tried it manually? If you do try manually, clone out the 22 on the left too.

 

[footman]

Odd. It will be to do with how Pas has blended the layers. Have you tried it manually? If you do try manually, clone out the 22 on the left too.

I'm so new to this I didn't know it could be done manually. I'll have a read if I can find something. Thanks for the reply.

 

[GardenersHelper]

You might want to download 30 day full function free trials of Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. These are both very good (I have both but prefer Helicon Focus, but a lot of people, perhaps the majority, prefer Zerene Stacker). However, they are quite expensive.

CombineZP is free. It is less sophisticated than Zerene or Helicon but fine for some people's purposes.

Some photo editors do stacking. Affinity Photo is one, and that is I think much less expensive than Zerene or Helicon. I don't know how good its stacking is. I understand there is a 10 day full function free trial of Affinity Photo.

 

[Pete B]

You might want to download 30 day full function free trials of Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. These are both very good (I have both but prefer Helicon Focus, but a lot of people, perhaps the majority, prefer Zerene Stacker). However, they are quite expensive.

CombineZP is free. It is less sophisticated than Zerene or Helicon but fine for some people's purposes.

Some photo editors do stacking. Affinity Photo is one, and that is I think much less expensive than Zerene or Helicon. I don't know how good its stacking is. I understand there is a 10 day full function free trial of Affinity Photo.

This was a 16 image stack in Affinity, did it seamlessly.

Rocky Nest by Pete Banks, on Flickr

 

[GardenersHelper]

This was a 16 image stack in Affinity, did it seamlessly

That's good. I had a look at the Affinity tutorials about focus stacking yesterday. As far as I can see it uses a single method and doesn't provide any parameters for it (unlike Zerene Stacker and Helicon with their two and three parameterised methods), so Affinity might have more trouble with some more difficult cases. Like Zerene and Helicon it does allow retouching from individual source images, which is good.