Helicon Soft Forum

Any chance that Helicon Focus could automatically process overlapping subgroups of files to create slab images as a future feature? The slabs could then be processed as normal. In addition to improving the treatment of overlapping features slabbing increases the total number of files that HF can process, (currently limited to 255). Currently it is very tedious to manually specify small overlapping groups of files to process by a batch operation. There are a couple of free script generators to do this in Zerene Stacker, but I prefer the processing of HF. For some strange reason ZS occasionally leaves horizontal artifact lines through occasional subgroup slabs.

New version of Helicon Focus 6 does not have limitation of 255 images per stack. Everything is possible and we can automate slabbing. But first please give us stack that actually benefits from such a technique.

Thanks Stas, I will try to work up a clear example. Where should I post a stack?

Please upload your stack to our server as described at http://www.heliconsoft.com/ftp.html

After spending many hours fiddling with a very bristly subject I've come to the conclusion that there does not seem to be any strong advantage to slabbing as far as the clarity of the final outcome. If anything the slabbed result seemed to have a bit less resolution than the product of normal processing. That being said, I'm not by any means an expert on the topic so this outcome might not be the final word on the subject. The ability to process more than 255 files would be of interest however. Is version 6 on the horizon soon? In case there is any value in the stack I uploaded them to:

ftp://heliconsoft.serveftp.com/Bristol/ ... ng%20Demo/

Best Regards,
Brent.

Many thanks for the tests. Helicon Focus 6 is available as beta from our site but we can't call it stable beta so far.

Stas,

I'm finding that the real utility in slabbing is not so much in the generation of the base image, but in the editing of it. For 10X images with a microscope objective I'm using 5 micron focus increments to avoid focus gaps. At that fine of depth of field it can be very tedious to correct bristles and such that have become semi-transparent due to stacking artifacts, but having a slabbed portion of the stack can make such editing much easier. It's easier to edit using a sub-stack of 10-15 frames instead of individual frames.

Yes, this makes sense, I agree. Ok, I will add this in our to-do list for version 6.

Thanks Stas, the usefulness of this would be expanded by allowing output of partial stacks to be available for editing. For instance if one processes an entire stack without slabbing, and then finds that some bristles need retouching, it would be of benefit to be able to process a partial stack that bounds an entire bristle and have the output image of that partial stack be available for editing the result of the full stack.

Yes, we do plan something like this.

Thank you Stas!

Did this get added in 6?

Thank you

Current version allows to use other output images as a source for retouching. Usually this could be results of methods B and C. But you can also compile full stack and then part of it. There is a secret trick though. Due to proper alignment only results that started from the same image are available as sources for retouching. So for partial stack please also include the first image in a stack.

Thank you for your reply!

Just to clarify, say I have a tricky stack of 30 images - bristly hairs etc. And whilst I have these images loaded in the editor, I decide I want to just stack images 5-10 and retouch from the result into one of the masters made of the whole set. Can I do that?

Thank you
-Johan

This is possible only if both results (full stack and partial stack) have the same first image. If you select 5 images in the middle of the full stack, the magnification of this partial result will be different from the full stack result. The program considers such results not compatible and does not show them in retouching.

If you keep first image in the partial stack, it will work though.