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Helicon Focus

HeliconFocus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas.

The program is designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography  to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem.

Helicon Focus also aligns images as objects often change their size and position from shot to shot. This function is especially important for macrophotography.

Copyright: Charles Krebs, 2007

Slideshow of the source images:

Fly Eye




Copyright: Charles Krebs, 2005

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Helicon Focus Lite (basic version):

  • automatically adjusts and resizes images (important for stereomicroscopes and macrophotography);
  • processes an unlimited number of images in the stack;
  • has no limitation on image resolutions (you need at least 512M RAM to work with 8Mp+ images);
  • supports "dust map" to automatically remove black points from the resulting images;
  • automatically adjusts brightness of the adjacent images;
  • reads RAW, 8bit and 16bit TIFFs, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, etc;
  • writes 8bit and 16bit TIFFs, JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP.
  • adds text and scale bar (v.4.0+)

Helicon Focus Pro (advanced version):

  • retouching brush to clone from aligned source images to the resulting image (cannot be performed with external photo editor, Windows v.4.0+)
  • batch mode to process multiple image stacks or the same stack with different parameters (Windows v.4.0+)
  • 2D micropanorama (Windows v4.30+, Mac v3.70+)
  • Export of animated stacks (see sample) (Windows v4.30+)

Helicon Focus Pro Multiprocessor(premium version):

  • optimized to use all processors available
  • 1.7 times faster with 2 processors
  • 2.3 times faster with 4 processors

Tested on Intel Core Quad 3GHz, 4Gb, Windows XP, 19 JPGs,8.2 Mp

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