Helicon Soft Forum

Is there way to save a stack as a16 bit TIFF? I prefer to do post in 16 bit and then convert to 8 bit. I cannot find a setting. My other stacking program can save in 16 bit.

Not sure what your source images are, but in In RAW-to-DNG mode, the stack can be saved as a TIFF which will have 16 bits/channel.

Frames from a 6K video, so I cannot use the RAW in DNG out function.

If the source has more than 8 bits per channel, the resulting TIFF will be 16-bit. If the source is 8 bit or less, the result is 8-bit. Video frames have no more than 8-bits (more is not impossible, but you will be hard-pressed to find such a video file right now).

Thanks.

I just wanted to say I would also like to have this feature, particularly for handling highlight brightness expansion with pyramids. Panasonic's November 19th firmware release added 10 bit 4k 30p to the G9 (https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/lumix/g9_firmware.html) so, if you're like @TheDocAUS and have a G9, 10 bit video's now much easier to come by. It's also a bit of an odd design choice that an 8 bit source blocks user access to Helicon's internal 16 bit computations (https://www.heliconsoft.com/features/). From what I know of the SSE, AVX2, and AVX-512 instruction sets I presume the stack output lands in a 16 bit array in memory and is reduced to 8 bit when saving. So it feels weird we can't put the 16 bit version of the data on disk if we want.

I think there's a workaround for this in converting video frames to 16 bit oneself ("C:\Program Files\Helicon Software\Helicon Focus 7\ffmpeg\ffmpeg.exe" -i "stack.mp4" -pix_fmt rgb48 stack%03d.tif) rather than relying on Helicon's internal 8 bit request.

Thanks for bringing this up, we'll have to make adjustment to how we unpack videos into individual frames as to prevent dynamic range loss for videos with more than 8 bits per pixel.