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!
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Insights, suggestions and comments
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.
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.
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!
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