![]() ![]() ![]() I discuss this phenomena (that I call "the smoothies" ) in my short blog on stacking. That beats the shoot/click fine focus adjust/shoot/repeat x 100 nonsense with Nikon's Camera Control pro. I can set up a stack in Helicon Remote, start it shooting, and leave it to run to the end. On another subject, I am liking the automation and focus control in Helicon Remote (for Mac). Is there a good guide somewhere to getting the best out of Zerene Stacker?ĭoes anybody else have good advice for getting the most out of Zerene, and how to retouch an image that comes out less than ideal? My goal for these images is to make bigger-than-life large prints, so flaws like translucent areas misalignments, and halos will really stand out. If I built this stack using PS, I could go edit the layer masks on the component layers to make the foreground bits fully opaque, but I don't know how to do that in Zerene. If you open the original image and zoom in, you see that lots of the near flower parts appear partly transparent, and show the bits behind. The second flower shot (I need to ask my wife what kind of flower this is) has more serious problems. The shot of the mum has the least artifacts: Just some minor blurring and halos around the edges of the flower. Most notably, parts of flower petals show up as translucent, and the areas behind show through. That seems to give the best results of all "out of the box", but still has problems here and there. Once I got the right settings, its output was an improvement over PS, but still had a fair number of flaws. It was decent, but required far too much touchup. I am only looking for an app that can perform the photo merging process - I don't need any camera remote control features as well.When I first started experimenting with Focus stacking I used the built-in auto-align layers/auto-blend layers feature of PS CS 6. Which one would you recommend (and why)? Last two ones are non-native apps (it seems). Photoshop Elements (using the Photomerge function).I did some research on this and the following came up: I read a lot before making my choice, but the real deal-maker for me was actually TRYING the software and observing the results and seeing how easy/hard it is to work with the software.īTW: Rik (Zerene's programmer) has some excellent tutorials on the Zerene site. If you don't already have Elements, then just eval Zerene and Helicon on your own stacks and make your own decision. ![]() Why are you concerned?īest bet: YOU should evaluate these on your own. I'm not concerned about this, as Java runs just fine on a Mac. I believe that both Zerene and Helicon are written in Java. One big advantage of Helicon over Zerene is that Helicon can use Raw files whereas Zerene is limited to TIFF and JPEG. Also, though, Zerene and Helicon use different algorithms, so one may do better than the other on some stacks. I prefer Zerene because its retouching method is a little easier than Helicon. Zerene and Helicon are also more reliable when it comes to producing usable composites of complex subjects. I find it slower than either alternative and also less reliable, so I tend to not recommend Photoshop for stacking unless one already has the program and is cash-constrained.īoth Zerene and Helicon are better with more complex stacks (example: butterfly wings whose fine hairs can overlap the scales-this can confuse Photoshop, but is easy to deal with in the other apps). Photoshop (CS6 and presumably later versions of Elements) works nicely for subjects that have reasonable contrast and require simple stacking. I currently use Zerene (the prosumer version because I like the brush and retouching capabilities) and am planning to license Helicon soon. I've stacked with Photoshop CS6, Zerene and Helicon. It looks like you'd like a simple "this one's best because" answer, but it's really not that simple. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |