Feature to soften sharp/unsharp transitions
One downside of focus stacking is that rather than the sharpness falling off linearly on both sides of the focus plane, sharpness in focus stacked images has a plateau with (usually steeper) sharpness falloff at each end. When shooting with a wide aperture (as I do) this falloff can look unnatural. It is, of course, best to avoid the situation by arrangement of the subject and background, but in situations where this is/was not possible, it would be nice to be able to tell the stacking software to artificially soften the transition from sharp to unsharp.
This might be accomplished by incrementally gaussian softening frames in the transition zone, or some other method compatible with the unified stacking engine. (Example attached).
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Comments3
Claus Giloi
Sep 2
Just another related thought: Since I shoot deep hand-held brackets, I almost always remove some source images from the beginning and and of my brackets. Helicon has the new feature in the pre-render dialog that lets you adjust the begin and end point of processed images and see the result in real time. I think this is cool, but I have to admit I rarely use it because it takes time to downscale and stack the preview image, but it’s also sometimes difficult to make decisions based on the reduced resolution. However, this would be the logical place to put an extra control to “ramp” the sharpness and see the result (in Helicon that is, not sure about Macro Studio).
Claus Giloi
Sep 2
Hi Ryan, thanks for responding. I was hoping for an at least semi-automated solution. I now, occasionally, manually soften a transition by retouching in pixels from “slightly wrong” source frames in the transition zone, but this is laborious. Seems like an automated solution might have to do something like this: Identify the “head” and “tail” in sets of source images that have NO detectable sharp pixels and subject the source images on either side between these points to (configurably) increasing degrees of gaussian softening. I’m going on the assumption that gaussian blur will adequately match CoC blur. It seems like this would work on the above image, but I have to give more thought if it will work in other situations. In any case, I thank you for even considering this.
Ryan Cush
Aug 30
@Claus Giloi thank you for suggesting this, I really like this idea. Yes, one thing I don’t like about some of the output images is the sharp transition. I want to think about the best way to implement this. One option is in the stacking algorithm itself, though it may “over soften” transitions that you want to remain sharp. Another option is in the Editor tool, perhaps there is a tool (similar to Retouch and Spot Correct) that let you brush a transition and have it apply a softening/transition effect to that layer. What do you think?