Helicon Soft Forum

Thanks for the suggestion. I will give this a try.

First of all, please try new beta of Helicon Focus with pyramid method. It works well with edges and intersecting objects.

Indeed there is no way to use source retouching image if it was not part of the stack.

I would recommend you the following approach:

1. Process the stack and save the result.

2. Create stack of merged image (A) and insurance image (B).

3. Process the second stack

4. Go to retouching, select very large brush without edge sensitivity

5. Use "clone from source", clone the whole image from A

6. Make brush smaller and clone problem areas from B

I have bought HF pro and I am having varying degrees of success. There is one thing I tried to do and failed but I wondered if there is a way of doing and it is this:

I stacked 20 images and processed them. I had several soft spots, mainly on the fringes of the subject - a small bracket fungus growing on a dead branch. When I take my images I always take what I call my insurance shot - one with a lot of DoF even if the background is in focus, which is usually undesirable. What I wanted to do after processing the 20 images (shot at F3.5 with my Canon 180mm macro + 5D mk III on tripod) was to use the insurance shot as a source to clone an area that was good in that one to replace the soft area in the stacked output image. (I could not find an original source image with the clarity I wanted.) I could not find a way of doing that. I subsequently reran the stacking including the insurance shot but unselected in the hope that in the retouching phase I could select the imported insurance image and use it as a supplementary source. That didn't work either. In the end I trashed the lot :-(

Is there a way of doing this? I hope I have explained it reasonably clearly.

Many thanks

Andrew H.