Helicon focus alternatives how to#
Helicon focus alternatives software#

Suppose that you need a total of five overlapping images from a horizontal pan in order to produce the panoramic stitch. You’ll need to pan your camera to take multiple overlapping images in order to produce the panorama. However, if you want to be able to print it really big, having a high-resolution image is important. You could use the technique above and then crop the image. Now imagine a similar scenario, but this time you want to shoot the leaves and the trees in a 3×1 format panorama. Shooting and processing this image would not be too hard: Meaning, you focus one image on the closest ground leaves, the second on the middle of the forest, and the last on the trees in the back. To keep things simple, also suppose that you can get away with just three shots for a focus stack.

Suppose you shoot a landscape of a forest with some leaves in the foreground, trees in the middleground, and more trees in the background. The reason is that the only blending necessary is that of identical shots, with the exception of their area of focus. Challenges with Panoramic Focus StackingĪlthough focus stacking is not easy, it is pretty straightforward when the desired final result will be a single 2×3 image.

Helicon focus alternatives how to#

This article also assumes that you know how to do basic panoramic photography, both in field and photo stitching in post-processing. Thus, the end result is a photograph which is in perfect focus from the closest to the furthest objects.

Helicon focus alternatives software#

Those images are all blended together afterwards with software in order to contain only the sharpest parts of each image. The purpose is to capture multiple shots where some focus on the foreground, others on the middle ground, and yet others on the background of the scene. The only difference among those shots is the focus setting of the lens. However, to recap briefly, focus stacking is the process of photographing the exact same scene with the exact same camera settings with multiple shots. It assumes that you already know how to do that with single-shot photographs.

The purpose of this article is not to explain what focus stacking is and how it is done. Challenges with Panoramic Focus Stacking.