Purists Look away now - focus stacking trial

[ColinC]

I've just downloaded the free combineZP focus stacking software as I wondered whether it was a solution to use a small aperature to get good background diffusion whilst maintaining sharpness across a wing.

Purists look away now but I thought I'd share what I've been able to do.

This is an example I often have where it is impossible to get square on to a roosting butterfly either because of vegetation or the focus is changing due to wind moving the subject.

I've either got the eyes in focus

eyes okay wing oof

or the rear wing

wing okay eyes oof antenna cloned out to avoid confusing alignment

Never Both and closing the aperature to increase dof may not always be an option.

Neither images are acceptable in their own right. BTW These images are croped & heavily reduced in resolution for web - the effect is far more noticeable at full resolution.

Using combine ZP you load in both images, the software can automatically aligns them and then you perform the focus stacking which takes about 5 minutes on my PC. It's surprising good, given that the butterfly was not in the same position in each frame due to the wind. However antenna do confuse the hell out of it so I've found its often best to clone them out from one or other of the images as above.

Here's the stacked image and the resulting crop.

stacked image

and this is the final image

final image

As I said "Not for purists" but does get you a "rescued" accepable sharp image from two also rans or using it you could be able to get focus right across a wing of a butterfly with partially open wings.

Small Coppers beware!!


Colin

[xmilehigh]

Hi,

Looks like it did a pretty good job there with merging of the images.
Downloading it now and Thank you for the info.

[ColinC]

I'd be interested to know how you get on.

This is a useful link http://www.flickr.com/groups/macroviewe ... ss/163367/

Colin

[FISHiEE]

Interesting thread. I tried an application called Combine ZM (I think) and couldn't fathom out how it worked (at least the results I got were terrible so guessed I was doing something wrong!). Perhaps ZP is a revised version. Must try it out.

I know several people produce some stunning 5x magnification images using the Canon MPE-65 and sometimes 10-15 or more images stacked (handheld images at that!) and wanted to be able to do the same myself.