RedRobin
Dances With Dogs
- Messages
- 9,314
- Name
- Robin
- Edit My Images
- Yes
Fabulous results there Robin. I use Affinity Photo, but I haven't yet for stacking.
The only hiccups I've had so far have been when it's been windy and the subject has moved.
Presumably because I usually only shoot RAW, I find that when I use the onboard stacking, it still gives me all the raw files as well as the jpegs, so I could also use Affinity as well as having the jpeg produced onboard. As yet, I haven't bothered, I've always been amazed at how good the jpegs are.
It makes sense to use less slices for animate objects and to use bracketing, rather than stacking (which I have only used for flowers anyway). I will have to give this a go - thanks for sharing!
.... Movement of the subject whether inanimate or animate is what messes up Focus Bracketing/Stacking - This is primarily why I shoot on a monopod even on the 40-150mm+1.4x combo. I find that Affinity is excellent at the first stage of aligning all the 'slices'.
In Affinity Photo use File > New Focus Merge, not New Focus Stack. And Export, not Save, as a TIF back into your main RAW editor. I don't do any RAW file adjustments until I have created my satisfactorily merged image file. Then I delete the slices.
Onboard Focus Stacking on the Olympus TG-6 doesn't offer the RAW files which result in a successfully* stacked JPEG < *It is only successful if all the onboard criteria are met and failure rate can be quite high. But the TG-6 also offers Focus Bracketing in RAW and let's you get ridiculously close to the subject.
Onboard Focus Stacking on the E-M1X (and doubtless the other M1 series bodies) is limited to both the number of brackets and differentials whereas onboard Focus Bracketing is not limited.
Another difference is that Focus Stacking will start bracketing backwards and forwards from your chosen AF spot whereas Focus Bracketing always only works backwards (into the distance) from your chosen AF start spot. Consequently Focus Bracketing offers far more extensive control of your background and its bokeh.
I have spent literally several hours chatting to Olympus about how this feature works and they have taught me what I am sharing here now in addition to my direct experience. This morning I went into my 1.5 acre 'BackYard' wilderness and shot over 700 images further getting familiar with Focus Bracketing, this time on the 40-150mm + 1.4x combo (on M1X). I have explored onboard Stacking on the TG-6 but not on the M1X yet.
If you don't already know, you can allocate one button to toggle between Bracketing On/Off by first saving your bracketing settings to a C-mode dial. I never ever shoot video and so have chosen the red button. This toggle is extremely useful in the field because it means you can grab a shot in the bag in normal mode (fully Manual in my case) and then think "hang on, he/she is staying dead still so I'll have a go at Bracketing".
Last edited: