DOF problems a thing of the past?
I haven’t actually tried it myself, but I recently stumbled over a piece of software called HeliconFocus. It promises to eliminate the DOF problem you get when photographing objects. Just imagine: You can photograph on the sweet spot of your lens (around f8 seems to be the highest sharpness / DOF tradeoff for most of my lenses), yet get everything in the image in complete, perfect focus!
Of course, this is a genius invention for people who work with Macro photography especially…
As the programmers themselves say:
HeliconFocus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas.
The program is designed for macro photography, micro photography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem.
Helicon Focus also aligns images as objects often change their size and position from shot to shot. This function is especially important for macrophotography.
Give it a shot. If anyone would like to do a review of it, let me know!
Have you read my Macro book?
I am rather proud of the fact that I have written a book about macro photography. It looks like that →
Hang on, did I just say a book? Sorry about that. All modesty aside, it's the book on macro photography. It's got a huge chapter on equipment, tons of info about the various styles and topics, a chapter on lighting, and even a chapter on digital darkroom stuff especially for macro photography.
Seriously, this book is 288 pages long, and it's got everything you ever wanted to know. And loads you probably didn't want to know, but that might come in useful anyway.
Get your copy of the book from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk today! If you prefer, you can buy a signed copy directly from me from this page.
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This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
#1 - July 27th, 2006 at 09:48
Helicon Focus is indeed an interesting piece of software.
Sven Gude (aka as Seemolf) has done some experiments:
http://www.geocities.com/seemolf/achromats/achromats.html
The topmost picture is a Helicon Focus stacked one, and nearly at the bottom of the page you can see two images of an ant, the right one is a stack of 3.
#2 - July 27th, 2006 at 13:29
HelionFocus: Increasing Depth-of-Field By Blending Exposures
DIY Photography links to an interesting piece of software called HelionFocus. Essentially what this does for you is allows you to take multiple photos of the same subject and and change the focus point in each shot. You then import the separate photo…
#3 - July 30th, 2006 at 01:30
DOF isn’t a “problem”, any more than gravity is. There are physical limitations on life based on natural laws. Optics are no exception. The program in question doesn’t “fix” anything, it simply modifies an image. People used to do it with film, and they still do it in photoshop. A modified image is neither better nor useful, it’s just different. Photographers have always used tricks to get what they want. This is just another trick. The irony of course is that no matter how much of the frame is in focus, your eyes can only focus on one object at a time anyway.
#4 - February 27th, 2007 at 22:56
A freebie focus-stacking software–CombineZM–is available on http://www.hadleyweb.com, and it may be worth a try.
Some of my stacks (as many as 12 frames) actually turn out nice! Other times, well, we won’t “go there”, heh-heh!