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. 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. On the other hand, Helicon Focus delivered consistent result from any stack I threw its way. 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. I have returned from a three week journey to Iceland co-leading two workshops with fellow Sony Artisan Gary Hart. Twenty-eight frames composited with Helicon Focus Captured with Sony a7RV + 100-400mm (shot at 300mm) in Focus Stack Mode. Export of 3D model of the object to Helicon 3D Viewer (included into Helicon Focus v4.Focus Stacking :: Photoshop or Helicon Focus? Sunrise-lit Mountain Near Vik, Iceland.Writes 8bit and 16bit TIFFs, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, PSD, PNG.Reads RAW, 8bit and 16bit TIFFs, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, etc.Automatically adjust brightness of adjacent images.Clean dust artifacts, by removing black points from the resulting images.Internal workflow always uses 16 bit color depth to preserve colors.Preserves details by using advanced interpolators for image manipulation (Lanczos, Sinc256).Process unlimited number of images in a stack.Has no limitation on image resolutions (512MB+ RAM required to work with 8Mp+ images).Automatically adjusts and resizes images (important for stereomicroscopes and macrophotography).Retouching brush to clone from aligned source images to the resulting image (cannot be performed with external photo editor).64 bit mode - get advantages of all available physical memory, significantly improves performance on machines with more than 2Gb of RAM.This function is especially important for macrophotography. Helicon Focus also aligns images as objects often change their size and position from shot to shot. The program is designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem. In other words, it creates one focused image from the set of several partially focused photographs by combining the focused areas. Helicon Focus is designed to blend the focused areas of several partially focused digital photographs to increase the depth of field.
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