Helicon Soft Forum

I work with live insects in the field mostly so it's handheld and hope for the best. I do understand that I am not using the software exactly as it's intended but my results are generally pretty good.

The issue is more that Helicon will sometimes seem to favor out of focus images over in focus images, even when the images seem to be lined up quite well...
Ah well, I'll deal with it I guess.

Linty,

Lots of practice and a good tripod along with a remote shutter cable are keys to getting good sharpness range throughout your images. I know when I started I had similar problems but I paid close attention to the images I'd taken, began to notice gaps in focus between images and got much better at turning the focus ring on my lenses. HC can tolerate a bit of camera movement but it can't create focus in areas where it doesn't exist.

I got to the point where I simply practiced a lot and always focused the same, from near to far, and got very good at barely turning the focus ring. Camera lenses are notoriously sloppy in their manual focus adjustments, a little motion changes the focus point by quite a lot. HC could really shine if some camera manufacturer would produce a lens where the manual focus adjustment was in much smaller increments, even if it took two rotations of the focus ring to do it.

Also, make sure you overlap your depth of field in your images by at least a third if you can. Hard to tell that but practice will give you a sense. It is better to have lots of overlapping images than too few that don't overlap.

Keep practicing, it's worth it.

I am having problems with Helicon Focus sometimes choosing blurry parts of a source over less blurry parts from another source. I don't know how to explain it but for example let's say a bug eye is in focus in one source picture, helicon sometimes chooses the eye section from a different picture. This happens in method A and B and I've tried changing the radius to both extremes.

I'll admit my source images may not be of the best quality at times and we may be talking about blurry vs blurrier, but should that be a problem?

Generally speaking I love the software and really hope I can find a way around this. I could only afford the lite version so if the software can't pick the sharpest source on it's own I'm a little bit screwed.