Focus stacking and software

For those Capture One (C1) users, it is easy to perform a roundtrip to and from ON1 Photo 2020 in order to create a focus stacked final image. This is particularly useful if an in-camera final has failed. Also, you have the option of saving the stacked final in ON1 in a variety of file formats including PSD and TIFF instead of JPG before it is automatically returned to C1 source.. Affinity doesn't do this as far as I can tell.

Apparently Olympus Workspace can stack a series of shot RAW image files. [Robin goes off to find a video tutorial]
 
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I was also surprised that you could photo stack hand held.
I did a search and I found the YouTube video that I watched.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HowcTTo3vfY

I have the same gear that he uses so I'll have to give it a try.
If you do a search on YouTube for "handheld focus stacking" it comes up with a whole list of candidates.

From my experience, although the developer part is good, On1 is rubbish at Focus Stacking and Affinity does a far better job.
Affinity can export in just about every format known, make sure you "Export" rather than "Save" - if you "Save" it saves in it's own (afphoto) format.
I don't use Olympus Workspace .
 
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Brian G said:
I was also surprised that you could photo stack hand held.
I did a search and I found the YouTube video that I watched.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HowcTTo3vfY

I have the same gear that he uses so I'll have to give it a try.
If you do a search on YouTube for "handheld focus stacking" it comes up with a whole list of candidates.

From my experience, although the developer part is good, On1 is rubbish at Focus Stacking and Affinity does a far better job.
Affinity can export in just about every format known, make sure you "Export" rather than "Save" - if you "Save" it saves in it's own (afphoto) format.
I don't use Olympus Workspace .
Click to expand...

.... As I shoot with Olympus bodies and lenses which all support in-camera focus stacking handheld and tripod, I don't need to follow Stewart Wood's technique. I don't use Lightroom either but I appreciate you posting the video - Thanks.

Re Affinity's Merge (focus stacking), I made the mistake of hitting 'Save' rather than 'Export'! And can't find where it has saved to so I can delete it - It didn't save back to Capture One alongside its source. It also destructively converted one of my ORF RAW files into a TIF < Necessary to work on surely but not destructively !?

I have yet to learn how to load several images at once from Capture One into Affinity for merging.
 
RedRobin said:
.... As I shoot with Olympus bodies and lenses which all support in-camera focus stacking handheld and tripod, I don't need to follow Stewart Wood's technique. I don't use Lightroom either but I appreciate you posting the video - Thanks.

Re Affinity's Merge (focus stacking), I made the mistake of hitting 'Save' rather than 'Export'! And can't find where it has saved to so I can delete it - It didn't save back to Capture One alongside its source. It also destructively converted one of my ORF RAW files into a TIF < Necessary to work on surely but not destructively !?

I have yet to learn how to load several images at once from Capture One into Affinity for merging.
Click to expand...
You cant directly. You can import to Capture One and carry out edits. You then need to open Affinity and select the multiple images from which ever folder they are stored in. Then export as psd or tif and open that back in capture one
 
RedRobin said:
.... As I shoot with Olympus bodies and lenses which all support in-camera focus stacking handheld and tripod, I don't need to follow Stewart Wood's technique. I don't use Lightroom either but I appreciate you posting the video - Thanks.

Re Affinity's Merge (focus stacking), I made the mistake of hitting 'Save' rather than 'Export'! And can't find where it has saved to so I can delete it - It didn't save back to Capture One alongside its source. It also destructively converted one of my ORF RAW files into a TIF < Necessary to work on surely but not destructively !?

I have yet to learn how to load several images at once from Capture One into Affinity for merging.
Click to expand...
I normally shoot Canon, both APS-C and FF. We had a speaker at the club talking about macro and he was extolling the virtues of Olympus focus stacking. I decided the camera he was using was too expensive, but I liked the Pen F and that did focus bracketing, but required an external prog to do the actual blending. I bought the Pen f and the 60mm macro lens, just for macro work. As ever, I discovered there's more to it than meets the eye, hence my frustration.

I'm not sure where Affinity stores it's saved files by default.
If I "Save" in Affinity it opens a dialog which allows me to select where I'm going to save.
I have a separate folder for my Affinity files, otherwise I put the exported files back into my image file directory, next to the original raw. I normally export as a 16-bit TIFF if I intend to do any further work on them, otherwise I export as a jpeg,
Affinity saves in its own format (.afphoto) so you'll probably need to do a search for your saved file.
Not sure about the destructive edit - I've never had that, but I always make sure I work on a copy.

Opening files for stacking in Affinity.
If you select "File" in Affinity you get a drop-down menu, one of the items is "New Focus Merge..." If you hit that a new dialog opens which allows you to select the files you want to blend.
Once you've selected the files you want to blend (they can be raw, tiff or jpeg) you just hit "OK" and it does it's thing. I had some files that produced artifacts when merged in On1, but they were perfect in Affinity without any extra work..
 
Brian G said:
I'm not sure where Affinity stores it's saved files by default.
If I "Save" in Affinity it opens a dialog which allows me to select where I'm going to save.
I have a separate folder for my Affinity files, otherwise I put the exported files back into my image file directory, next to the original raw. I normally export as a 16-bit TIFF if I intend to do any further work on them, otherwise I export as a jpeg,
Affinity saves in its own format (.afphoto) so you'll probably need to do a search for your saved file.
Not sure about the destructive edit - I've never had that, but I always make sure I work on a copy.

Opening files for stacking in Affinity.
If you select "File" in Affinity you get a drop-down menu, one of the items is "New Focus Merge..." If you hit that a new dialog opens which allows you to select the files you want to blend.
Once you've selected the files you want to blend (they can be raw, tiff or jpeg) you just hit "OK" and it does it's thing. I had some files that produced artifacts when merged in On1, but they were perfect in Affinity without any extra work..
Click to expand...

.... Thanks Brian, very helpful. I did my first stack (merge) in Affinity this evening of a tiny Crab Spider I photographed at dusk. I always save as a 16-bit TIFF too until the very final output as a JPG. It was a stack of 34 although my Olympus M1X was only set to 14, but the Differential was set to 1 so that might have been why 34. Because of the low light I had to shoot at 1/40s (handheld) and F/2.8 because I wanted to keep to the M1X optimum image quality of ISO 200. I am still exploring my first efforts.

Watching the merge (stack) combine live was just like being back in the darkroom again in the days of film! I rather enjoyed it. Yes I now much prefer Affinity to ON1 for stacking.

CRAB SPIDER AT DUSK by Robin Procter, on Flickr
 
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That's just amazing Robin!

Yes, watching the stack "develop" in Affinity is a bit like watching a darkroom print develop.
 
Excellent result Robin I’ll have to try stacking in affinity as I mentioned before I’ve been doing it manually with the healing brush tool in photoshop but that’s only stacking a few shots
 
LCPete said:
Excellent result Robin I’ll have to try stacking in affinity as I mentioned before I’ve been doing it manually with the healing brush tool in photoshop but that’s only stacking a few shots
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.... In Affinity, as in other stacking software, you can combine as many images as you like from 2 upwards.

As Brian told me earlier, when finished, Export don't Save if you want a file format other than Affinity's own. And to start, Menu > New Merge... > Add to Source window and enjoy watching it develop before your eyes like the magic of the darkroom in the dark ages :D.
 
RedRobin said:
.... In Affinity, as in other stacking software, you can combine as many images as you like from 2 upwards.

As Brian told me earlier, when finished, Export don't Save if you want a file format other than Affinity's own. And to start, Menu > New Merge... > Add to Source window and enjoy watching it develop before your eyes like the magic of the darkroom in the dark ages :D.
Click to expand...
Thanks Robin
I’ve never actually tried specific stacking software as I don’t do complicated !
Thanks for the explanation too
 
LCPete said:
Thanks Robin
I’ve never actually tried specific stacking software as I don’t do complicated !
Thanks for the explanation too
Click to expand...

.... I try and stay away from 'complicated' too! In fact it's why I had never attempted any focus stacking at all until it became an in-camera option. Even now, it can be a bit touch and go but that's probably because I'm attempting handheld macro stacks on live subjects and those are the most challenging to nail.
 
RedRobin said:
.... I try and stay away from 'complicated' too! In fact it's why I had never attempted any focus stacking at all until it became an in-camera option. Even now, it can be a bit touch and go but that's probably because I'm attempting handheld macro stacks on live subjects and those are the most challenging to nail.
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I presume that rather than let the camera stack for you robin ,your processing all the raw files Y/N in affinity ..is this superior to the j.peg produced by the camera
 
the black fox said:
I presume that rather than let the camera stack for you robin ,your processing all the raw files Y/N in affinity ..is this superior to the j.peg produced by the camera
Click to expand...

.... No, I am always letting the camera stack my RAW shots for me onboard which result in a JPG (when stacking doesn't fail onboard). Because the M1X (and doubtless M1-series) keeps those shot slices regardless, I can choose to stack them myself in Affinity (or other software).

However, I don't think the little TG-6 keeps the stack slices for you to upload from the card.

I don't think it's possible to say that one stacking method is superior to the other because every combined stack depends on how good the slices were, if that makes sense!

Btw, I love your new black fox head avatar!
 
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Cheers rob
 
LCPete said:
Excellent result Robin I’ll have to try stacking in affinity as I mentioned before I’ve been doing it manually with the healing brush tool in photoshop but that’s only stacking a few shots
Click to expand...


I used to use Photoshop for all my focus stacking (up to about 12 images) and Panoramas (up to 6x6 grid, total 36 images) and for the most part adobe did them automatically, quick and very well. Just the odd failure due to the images not being right. Affinity has dealt with them all, even the ones PS failed on. I wouldn't know where to start focus stacking manually in PS, that's why I use it's dedicated feature.
 
I no longer have Photoshop, and even when I had it I never used the stacking or panorama tools.
For Blending/stacking I have the choice of On1 (which doesn't do a great job) and Affinity, which is very impressive.
For panoramas On1 does a good job and I haven't tried Affinity.
I have PTGUI and I've also used Microsoft Image Composite Editor for panoramas, both of which work fine.
 
RedRobin said:
However, I don't think the little TG-6 keeps the stack slices for you to upload from the card.
Click to expand...

.... Except that I have now found that fortunately the Olympus TG-6 compact, like its big brother E-M1 series, does keep the images when they fail to combine/stack in-camera (usually user error!) and then later they can be successfully stacked > 'New merge...' in Affinity.

Regarding in-camera focus stacking there is something to be said for ignoring the in-camera feature and just shooting in Focus Bracketing and stacking the images in Affinity in post-processing < At least on the TG-6.

I really enjoy watching the images combining and merging live in slo-mo in Affinity - Am I weird? [@the black fox Jeff, don't answer that!]
 
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