Hi Tim, I 1st saw this on Flickr and was blown away with the detail, just WOW
Thanks guys!
Hi Tim
The stack on the beetle is nicely done. What I find distracting is the foreground. I wonder if you had a shot with some of this in focus from one of the 15 so you could merge it in more naturally ?
Thanks Chris. I think I should have at least "some" slices with more of the foreground in focus, and I think you are right. What I tend to do it focus attention on the subject, but it would look better with more detail in the surrounding environment. This is often a challenge, as when stacking (particularly handheld) you have to compensate for subject movement and how it moves around in frame (handshake) you don't often get enough of the surrounding environment to make it work (you end up with radial "streaks" of blur that just look wrong).
In this example, zerene actually errored when processing the stack because there was too much subject movement and it began to fall off the bottom of the frame. To resolve this I went back into Lightroom and did a tight crop of the subject image, which I duplicated across the rest of the frames (manually adjusting the crop so they all were lined up in a similar way). This meant that there was less movement of the subject in frame and zerene was able to process them successfully. After this I removed the crops in lightroom, and pasted by processed stack over one of the frames in PS, blending the edges to bring back the surrounding environment. I actually have the option of blending in some other frames to bring back some of the foreground detail, so I might revisit this and give it a try.
Sometimes it just doesn't look right, as the drop off between the sharp and OOF focus areas is very severe at these magnifications and apertures. Fortunately I've been doing further research and I may have hit upon a solution. I noticed some other "stackers" I've been following on flickr, detail how their stacks have been but together and you sometimes see things like this:
"40 images F/4, 2 images F/13"
I wondered what the reason for the higher aperture images were for and it turns out it is precisely for this issue. It seems if you take a couple of wider DOF frames, you can include these to improve the appearance of the surrounding background and perhaps more importantly the transition between the sharp and OOF areas look more natural. I assume there may be issues with the camera movement when adjusting the aperture, or matching the exposure (I usually shoot with ETTL so hoping this won't be too much of an issue) but this is something I want to start trying with future stacks. Hopefully you will begin to see an improvement!
Thanks very much for the feedback, good to know it aligns with my own thoughts on the matter and I hope I have found a good way to try to rectify in future
Bronzed by Tim.Garlick, on Flickr
