Trying out Helicon Focus today. I had read about this program in MR. Heard about it from Jeff. Tried it out today. If you don't know about Helicon Foucus, the program takes pictures you take of the same scene, but different focus points and blends them into one picture. Taking pictures up close, your depth of field is real short. In other words, only certain spots will be in focus, but nothing else. Shooting Z scale trains is almost impossible since you can't get everything in focus. Helicon Focus will let you try out the full version for free for 30 days. Below is my first attempt from 7 pictures: Submit your examples here.
Another picture from about 7 pictures. I still need a cable release (on order) to get rid of the fuzz on the edge of the car. AND get the hairs off the module!
Both pictures shot indoors, believe it or not. I took a sky picture and printed it up 8" x 11". Placed in background.
Yep, works great, if you don't have an SLR (film) or DSLR (digital) with most zoom lenses which have less focal depth. If you have a quality lense (and camera) that can stop down to f:18 or better f:22, you wouldn't need it and you could take a single shot. But for $30 a year or $115 a lifetime, if you don't mind take a series of 5 or more pictures, it works great !! .
Is the focus thing the only thing Helicon does? And for needing multiple pictures to work, does the program not have an auto alignment feature that would fix problems like zscaler had? It sounds to me like $115 is way over priced vs something like Photoshop Elements ($99), from which can get the same results (although probably takes 1 or two more steps) but you get the added bonus of color correction and a whole world of tools as well.
I am putting some of my problem to not using a remote shutter release. My hand caused a slight change in each picture which the Helicon program could not handle. I now have the cable release and will try again.
Used the external shutter release this time. Seems to have fixed the haze thing. I cropped the original picture and pasted some rocks in the bottom left corner to cover up the edge of the module.
I've used Helicon extensively since it first came out. I even use it with a 12-24mm lens on Nikon DSLRs sometimes. While the f/22 stop at 12mm gives extremely good depth of field, it also results in some diffraction. So I take slices at f/11 for greater sharpness. Helicon does a fairly good job in orienting slices and adapting for color and exposure changes, but it is not flawless. I use manual settings for exposures, which eliminates most variation from slice to slice. This is not a big deal with a DSLR--I use the built-in features to establish the correct exposure, than go manual with those settings. Helicon can be fooled, as its algorithm depends on judging sharpness by pixel size (basically). It sometimes gets confused by the railings on my ships, for example. I can fix that by eliminating a slice or two from the sequence. This does take a little guesswork as to which slices to eliminate, but Helicon is very fast and efficient, so it's not time consuming. Helicon can also be fooled when you extend its range beyond what is needed. For example, imagine a shot that needs to be sharp from 6 inches to 12 feet. If you take slices much beyond 12 feet in focus (i.e., out to infinity), it may try to fit them into the final image, with degraded results. The preview pane helps me eliminate those slices. A "trick" I learned when I need very close focus is to start at f/22 for the first two or three closest focus slices, then switch to f/11 (adjusting the exposure) for further out slices. I find it's a great tool. I think I paid $250 for a lifetime license, and thought that was a good deal.
