Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, more is more. There is a type of person who believes that if enough photos of the same subject are taken, one of them will shine above the rest as a gleaming example of what is possible with a phone camera and a steady hand. Other people know how to frame a picture before hitting the shutter button. In some cases, the best method may be snapping a handful of photos to get one good one, not by chance, but by design.
[The Thought Emporium]’s video, also below the break, is about getting crisp pictures from a DSLR camera and a microscope using focus stacking, sometimes called image stacking. The premise is to take a series of photos that each have a different part of the subject in focus. In a microscope, this range will be microscopic but in a park, that could be several meters. When the images are combined, he uses Adobe products, the areas in focus are saved while the out-of-focus areas are discarded and the result is a single photo with an impossible depth of focus. We can’t help but remember those light-field cameras which didn’t rely on moving lenses to focus but took many photos, each at a different focal range.
[The Thought Emporium] has shown us his photography passion before, as well as his affinity for taking the cells out of plants and unusual cuts from the butcher and even taking a noble stab at beating lactose intolerance.
Does anybody know of any halfway decent open source focus stacking projects that are actually scriptable and, well, actually work fairly well as a mostly automated solution for both static focus stacking capture and post processing? The only two open source solutions I have come across sort of worked but both were very hacked together and not polished at all or barely worked and had not been updated in ages. Not sure the Adobe solution is even that good to be honest either though in theory it can be scripted to do batch work?
There’s a few other closed source projects as well, such as Helicon but none seem to actually be polished, easy to use and scriptable such that you can automatically integrate it with a decent enough DSLR that can actually handle automatically moving the focal point for the entire static image you are trying to capture and don’t crash. I have only fooled around with focus stacking fairly briefly and am by no means an expert here though by any means.
Helicon is supposed to be one of the best in the field. the problems is that usually not two objects are alike and there are multiple algorithms/settings to do the stacking some work better than others and some work better only in special cases.
my personal experience with image stacking is that often even specialized commercial offerings can suck and the more general algorithm like Photoshop although not perfect work quite well. producing excellent to perfect stack is hard work and i don’t believe it can be completely automated ( i assume that’s what you want?).
working with microscopic sample usually makes matters worse because you need image stacking and stitching and I’m not aware of any program that can do both simultaneously (PTgui and Autopano pro work very nicely for stitching microscopic images).
in many academic and industrial applications images with huge DOF is a hot topic. so much so that most big name manufacturer like Leica and Keyence offer digital microscopes that have this function built in hardware multi mm DOF are doable easily with such systems.
are you referring to images done on conventional lenses or on microscopes?
OPENSAUCE
Enfuse can also be used for other purposes like night photography and focus stacking.
http://software.bergmark.com/enfuseGUI
focus stacking.
HDR for macro