Wednesday 11 March 2020

Helicon Focus

Helicon Focus is a focus stacking program available for Windows and Mac.
Not cheap at $200 + taxes but it does handle CR2 RAW photos from the Canon M5 as well as JPG.
Processing JPGs is very fast. RAW photos take a lot longer as the program uses an Adobe converter to convert CR2 to DNG for use in  processing. It is worth the wait though for the extra quality.
Output files can be DNG, TIFF or JPG.

Even the JPG stacking is a vast improvement over the other programs I have.

This from stacking 36 JPG shots in Zerene Stacker
2020-03-05-17.56.05 ZS PMax

The same JPG shots processed in Helicon Focus
2020-03-10 19-41-25 (A,Radius6,Smoothing4)

This time a stack of 70 RAW shots
2020-03-10 15-09-16 (A,Radius6,Smoothing4)b

of a rather dried up Chinese Lantern seed case.

1 comment:

  1. This is excellent.
    Just watch it isn't generating TIFF files and hiding them in a temp folder. Adobe sometimes does this to me and I have never worked out why. You may not notice with a few dozen but if you are doing timelapse you will.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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