A dozen flower images from a technical exercise

GardenersHelper

GardenersHelper

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I just finished a technical exercise looking into using a combination of stacked images and single-capture images for flowers and other botanical subjects. It is written up in my "Journey" thread, starting here. As described in this post, the exercise produced a dozen images that I quite liked, which I am posting in this and the next post.

These images were created from raw stills and, for the stacks, 6K videos captured hand-held a few days ago in our garden using a Panasonic G9 and Olympus 60mm macro. The stills were processed in DXO PhotoLab followed by Lightroom. Helicon Focus was used to extract JPEGs from the videos and stack them, followed by Lightroom.

There are 1300 pixel high versions of these images in this album at Flickr.

#1 A stack of 45 video frames

1474 01 1473 05 2019_04_24 P1022820 45f B21,2 LR 1300h (Stack) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


#2 A stack of 42 video frames

1474 02 1473 07 2019_04_24 P1022854 42f B21,2 LR 1300h (Stack) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


#3 A stack of 38 video frames

1474 03 1473 09 2019_04_24 P1022894 38f B22,1 LR 1300h-2 (Stack) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


#4 A single-capture image

1474 04 1473 10 2019_04_24 P1022907_PLab LR CNED 1300h (Single) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


#5 A stack of 62 video frames

1474 05 1473 15 2019_04_24 P1023018 62f B22,1 LR 1300h (Stack) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


#6 A single-capture image

1474 06 1473 18 2019_04_24 P1023086_PLab LR 1300h (Single) by gardenersassistant, on Flickr



Continued in next post
 
 
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A great selection of images. May I ask what software you use for the focus stacking and what you would recommend for a focus stacking beginner.
 
daveh said:
A great selection of images. May I ask what software you use for the focus stacking and what you would recommend for a focus stacking beginner.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I used Helicon Focus to do the stacking. There are two very good specialised stacking products, Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus. There are other products you can use. For example, CombineZP is a specialised focus stacking product which has the merit of being free, and the inexpensive Affinity Photo can do focus stacking. Both however are I believe rather limited compared to Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus, but that may not be a problem depending on how deeply you want to get into stacking and how particular you are about, for example, glitches in the stacking. You can also focus stack in Photoshop, although that may involve rather more work than other products.

I would recommend having a look at the Zerene Stacker tutorials and the Helicon Focus help to see what they can do. You could then download a free 30 day trial for one or both of them to have a look at what they are like to use. You will then be in a better position to decide whether to buy one of them (they are not cheap) or instead to try one of the less expensive options.
 
Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. As suggested, I will have a look at the tutorials and download the trials. Just need to take some pics now.
 
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