R6 Focus Stacking bracketing to overexposed images

John Photo wrote:

Blue-Shift wrote:

Polcastrol wrote:

Do you have 'exposure smoothing option'? Like here:

https://cam.start.canon/vi/C004/manual/html/UG-03_Shooting-1_0290.html

New firmware update is also available.

Two good points, thank you! Exposure smoothing is available for R6 MK1. I never tried it, although I doubt it is the explanation here. I know that effective aperture gets darker with closer focusing, but it hardly can explain that difference.

Ah, and thanks for the headsup. Installing the new firmware now

I seem to recall someone posting a really nice looking in-camera focus stank here, although I can't recall who; but I'm pretty sure that it was on this R forum. Maybe do a search for it. If the details in it aren't specific enough, at least you might be able to ask the poster about his/her experience and settings.

The camera can't perform wonders. If more distanced details are overlapped by elements closer physics will prevent capture of areas around the closer elements. Those areas will be obscured no matter which step size you set. So if you photograph flowers, insects or anything else that has overlapping elements within the stack you will have to spend hours carefully masking these element surrounding areas and invent (content aware fill with fitting subject areas) those. The only ever decent stacks I have ever seen were printed in a French nature photography magazine and the photographer said he expects to spend between 12 and 24 hours of straight editing on a single image to remove those un-capturable areas...

The camera will probably be better than Zerene or Helicon focus though - as it will have access to the phase difference because of the dual pixel design of current camera sensors - thus instead of having to calculate which layer contains which subject areas by means of frequent analysis it can use the phase difference, that is more precise and less error prone. But it can't remedy the above mentioned problems.

Other problems that I regularly encounter when presented with stacks is a too sharp drop of sharp captured area to the background (that can be an artistic choice so open for discussion if you like it or not) and a lack of depth indications within the stacked area. Often you can not determine which subject area belongs where - like which antenna is oriented towards the camera and which is pointing away from it, you will have to work hard with your lighting setup to remedy that deficiency...