Focus Stacking With My Brand New Sony A7RV

Montanawildlives wrote:

Sasquatchian wrote:

Of course you need an autofocus lens for automated in camera focus bracketing and some of the best macro lenses are manual only, so don't let the lack of autofocus keep you from focus bracketing.

Focus stacking in Photoshop is rudimentary at best. It's a two step process where the first step, Align Layers actually works quite well, but the whole thing falls apart when it comes to Blend Layers where the typical crappy results are seen.

The easiest stacking software is Helicon but there are a couple or caveats, having done many hundreds of stacking projects. You absolutely have to go into the Preferences and change the defaults in the interpolation options to whatever is the very slowest option. It makes a huge visible difference in the quality of the stacking and slows down the process. You probably won't get those fast stacking times this way but they will be better.

Secondly, you may have to tweak the preferences for how much resizing or rotation the program is allow to do during the stacking process, particularly with lenses that have a high degree of focus breathing as you move from close to further away. And then, for most stacking operations, Mode C seems to provide the best quality.

There are situations where Helicon falls apart - and those are generally when you have a flat, flatly lit surface with little or no detail that's coming toward the lens. Those flat areas can often get weird banding and other artifacts that will need retouching. When those happen, I've found that Zerene Stacker usually handles those areas quite a bit better, but if you don't want to have multiple stacking apps on hand, I always recommend Helicon first.

I've gotten good results with Zerene and Helicon but for my relatively infrequent stacking I have reverted to just using Photoshop. Each program uses it's own parameters and algorithms and, while I might give the edge to the dedicated stacking programs overall, there are times when Photoshop nails it and the others return absurd results. Probably 20% of the time PS nails it and 40% of the time it is Zerene and the same for Helicon, but the ease of use of PS is also a consideration for me. It also seems that PS rarely completely screws up whereas the others can go off the rails sometimes. Manual repairs are also very easy in PS but more complicated in the other programs (maybe just because I am well-versed in PS's masking).

Anyway, I'd suggest trying PS before purchasing another program (assuming you already have LR/PS). The particulars of the photos have a lot more to do with the results than the program used.

I've never had Ps nail focus stacking ever. But if you have modest sized files, it's possible that it might be okay for you. I'm generally working with between one hundred and three hundred 600mb files from a GFX 100s and when things are not right, they're really not right.