Helicon Focus is not only very intuitive to use with a beautiful interface, but its algorithms also work surprisingly well for my detailed photos of woodland from Costa Rica. I downloaded and installed it, put a complex pile of woods into Helicon’s Lightroom Plugin, and quickly stacked and retouched my first photo with it. Conveniently, Helicon Focus offers a 30 days trial with full functionality. After Alex Armitage mentioned it again in a comment under my handheld focus stacking post, I had to give it a try. I heard about Helicon Focus years ago but for some reason dismissed it. I needed a more convenient and precise way to piece everything together. Once I took my first pictures of the chaotic jungles of Costa Rica in Monteverde, I was able to afford manual stacking. For some such photos, the stacking can take me up to half an hour or even an hour. But especially when it comes to woodland photos, it can be difficult to find and combine the sharpest areas. And for most photos, this is a viable option. Acceptable sharpness is often not sharp enough for large prints that I want to sell.īecause of the limitations of Photoshop’s automatic stacking algorithm, which often results in uncorrected areas in the final image that need to be fixed, I usually do the stacking manually using masks in Photoshop. Using the super-sharp distance while trying to make everything acceptable with just one photo has always been too big of a compromise for me. And with Helicopter focus I found it.įor over 10 years, I have now stacked my landscape and architecture photos for optimal sharpness from foreground to background. This option has its limitations and since I recently had to work on some very complex stacks I had to look for a better solution. In this article, I share my field workflow, as well as the automatic stacking option Photoshop offers to stitch all the images together during photo editing. A few weeks ago I published an article here on Fstoppers about hand-held focus stacking.
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