That product at the time never took off but now all the major brands of cameras offer focus stacking including Sony. I did this 10 years ago when I first started experimenting with focus stacking and actually was testing a focus stacking device made by a company in Dallas. My advice if you are interested in purchasing Helicon Focus is to pay for the lifetime license. Now let’s take a look at Helicon’s blending of the same images: With Helicon Focus, the entire foreground was blended seamlessly with no hint of softness. Let’s take a closer look at just the dark foreground area of rocks where Photoshop clearly struggled: Photoshop’s blend of the dark foreground rocks was very inconsistent. I purposely processed this image a bit brighter to reveal the irregularities of the darker foreground blends. When you are done with refining the focus-stacked image in Helicon Focus, the plugin loads the finished photo into Capture One. Some rocks are sharp while other areas are soft. Notice the lack of consistent blend in the foreground. All 28 frames were opened as a stack, aligned, then blended – here is the result: Photoshop blended frame. Here is the same image composited in Photoshop. Moreover, the entire process in Helicon is faster than Photoshop’s two-step method of opening as a stack out of Lightroom, then aligning and blending in Photoshop. If you have any questions feel free to ask below. When you need 50 or more stacks together I recommend Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker. Now, you can use Photoshop and Lightroom to merge your images together but they only can handle basic photographing stacks. On the other hand, Helicon Focus delivered consistent result from any stack I threw its way. If you want a little more than that you can check out my Helicon Focus Mini-course. What I found out after a week of working on files is that Photoshop is good most of the time but struggles when there are a lot of dark tones (such as the foreground of this 28-layer stack). What I wanted access to were the RAWS so I could use either Photoshop CC 2022 or Helicon Focus to assemble the frames. In short, I don’t care that the camera does not do the composite as that would be a JPEG file. One of the features I have been asking our engineers for that was included in this camera was the ability to focus stack and have access to the RAW files. I love guiding this workshop and as a bonus this year I got to work with the new Sony a7RV. In other words, it creates one focused image from the set of several partially focused photographs by combining the focused areas. I have returned from a three week journey to Iceland co-leading two workshops with fellow Sony Artisan Gary Hart. Helicon Focus is designed to blend the focused areas of several partially focused digital photographs to increase the depth of field. Twenty-eight frames composited with Helicon Focus Captured with Sony a7RV + 100-400mm (shot at 300mm) in Focus Stack Mode. Focus Stacking :: Photoshop or Helicon Focus? Sunrise-lit Mountain Near Vik, Iceland.
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