Focus versus Rail stacking Poll

DavidWright2010 wrote:

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?

I think that the ratio of rail movement to camera distance is the significant factor. For example, let's say 1:10 is OK in your experience (10cm:100cm). Then if you shot something smaller at say 10cm distance then 1cm rail movement would be good (obviously a close-up shot and probably not with a DP3M).

(Or the stacker compensated by locating control points?)

Entirely likely - 'Hugin' gives me control point resolution in pixels which help.

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.

Understood. That manual distance scale on the LCD is nothing like the excellent scale on the Sigma true macro lenses e.g. the 70mm.