Focus Stack Retouching
Ian Plant
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Focus stacking is a great method for blending a combination of images captured from the same locked-down position but focused at different points. In this free video, world renowned outdoor photographer Ian Plant introduces you to Helicon Focus, a standalone piece of editing software he highly recommends. A common problem when blending images is movement, clouds in motion or tree branches swaying. Ian shows you how he focus-stacked eight landscape images, then found the clouds were out of alignment. He demonstrates how to use the retouching tool to make the corrections and turn the final file into a beautifully sharp landscape. Join pro photographer Ian Plant for the most efficient way to make focus stacking work for you.
Helicon Focus is a fantastic program for blending focus stacked images. But sometimes if you have moving elements in your scene, especially when you have something like fast-moving clouds, for example, like I have in this shot here from Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, there will be some errors. There is a great tool in Helicon Focus, however, that will allow you to easily fix those errors. So here, we can see I've got my focus stack blend, on the left is the original source image, and on the right, you see the blended images of eight different focus stack exposures. And you can see a lot of errors here in the clouds in the sky.
And this was because as Helicon Focus was stacking the images and focus blending 'em, it didn't really know which clouds to source from. And as a result, you've got a lot of duplication and a lot of other weird errors in the sky. If I go over to the Retouching tab, it pulls up a mouse dialogue that I can resize using the bracket keys. I'm gonna use the right bracket key to make the the mouse window bigger. And on the left, it's showing you the source file where Helicon Focus is taking the data from the original file, and on the right, it's gonna show you a preview.
as I move the mouse around of how that source file will be used to repair the errors that were made. So just with a click of my mouse, as I run the mouse over the areas that have errors, you can see that Helicon Focus is repairing those by sourcing data from one of the original files. And the great thing about Helicon Focus is I can choose which file that I'm gonna use as my source file. So I'm just using the default file that Helicon Focus picked, but I can go through all of my focus stack files and pick the one that has the best information for repairing the data. And as I wave this over the sky, you can see that the errors are being fixed.
And when I'm completely done, I will just release the mouse key. And there you have it, Helicon Focus has fixed all the errors, and now the sky looks the way it should.
Nice review of something I have never tried. You glossed over the software. No where in your description do you mention the software. What are you using? Are there others that you might use?
<strong> Ticket 17298 I'm assuming that you're focusing by hand for this. Have you tried the Helicon FB tube to do this automatically? Any opinions on that piece of hardware?
Ian, while you very briefly touched on the fact that you can use any of the images from the stack you used the first one which is the closest focused image. For the clouds most likely the last image of the group was the one that was truly focused on the clouds. I personally would have selected the last image to correct the clouds, starting with a larger brush to correct the areas with only sky & clouds and no other close objects such as the branches of the dead tree. Then I would have reduced the size of the brush to a much smaller size, , increased the brush hardness and zoomed in some and brushed around the branches to correct the clouds near the branches. I have used this technique extensively and while a bit time consuming yields very good results. It is also useful with you have motion of trees etc. due to wind. Helcon will sometimes get confused about which focal distance to use. Using a small brush size, I will select the image that has the best focus for the object and brush over the areas Helcon wasn't able to properly identify. I know this was just a demonstration but you also briefly brushed over the mountain which would have caused it to appear out of focus.