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Problem – focused details blending into background images

Posted: 17.09.2016 20:48
by Mark mathu
Last night I tried taking my first stacks of photos with Focus and Remote using my Nikon camera. I'm having a little problem with some of the finer details getting blurred into the background on the focused output – see the handrails on the left side of this image. I'm trying various combinations of rendering methods, radius, and smoothing but so far have been unable to find a combination which reduces the artifacts. Any suggestions on changing my composing, stacking, or rendering technique to minimize the problem?

The image is attached. My 9 raw Nikon NEF files plus an output DNG file are here
ftp://upload:nopassword@217.12.211.23/MarkMathu/

I took the images using an aperture of f/8 and with the focus steps set by Remote's "auto" function. I selected f/8 because I thought that focal length would be near the "sweet spot" for my Tamron 18-270mm F/3.5-6.3 lens. Would a smaller (or larger) aperture or more (or less) steps in the stack help the image? Or is this one of those situations where the background makes it difficult for the software to distinguish the properly focused pixels regardless of the rendering method? Unfortunately I took these photos away from my home so I can't replicate the photo shoot today.

Re: Problem – focused details blending into background images

Posted: 19.09.2016 11:54
by Stas Yatsenko
Hello Mark!

I have a couple of advices which might improve your results.

If you look at the gravel near the train, you will see that step is too big and there are stripes of blurriness on the result. I recommend to set correction factor to 0.5 for a start, so that Helicon Remote calculate smaller step for the same aperture.

I also recommend to use smaller aperture. The handrails almost disappear when you focus on the background and this confuses the program. Alternatively, you can keep current settings and repaint missing details from source image on retouching tab.

Re: Problem – focused details blending into background images

Posted: 20.09.2016 14:53
by Mark mathu
Thank you! I will try those. As I said, this was my first attempt at shooting with the software, so I was relying on defaults.