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Focus versus Rail stacking Poll

Started Jun 11, 2019 | Polls thread
DavidWright2010 Veteran Member • Posts: 3,729
Re: Focus versus Rail stacking Poll

Bill Janes wrote:

Rik Littlefield, author of Zerene Stacker and one of the moderators of the above forum, has a good post on this subject. Which method to use depends mainly on the magnification.

I read this Rik Littlefield post, and he mentions all the problems I imagined that the rail method introduces. (More than I imagined, actually.) And he claims that the rail method is 'mediocre' for a flower bouquet. Given the problems he discusses, that seemed a fair assessment.

But my experience does not bear that out. The rail method is at least 10x easier than the focus method for me - in this recent post, I presented a stacked flower bouquet where I accepted the stacker output without any changes. My bouquet required about 10 cm of camera movement (1 meter camera-subject distance) - maybe that was sufficiently small that perspective changes weren't noticeable? (Or the stacker compensated by locating control points?)

And of course, this is using a Sigma DP3M camera - there's no software control of focus like is offered with a Nikon, and it is very difficult to get regular focus steps by manually adjusting focus.

David

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