This way, I make my image portfolio future-proof because the DNG standard is open and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to open my DNG images for years to come. When I import my raw images, I automatically convert them to DNG images. I’ve been using DNG images since I started taking pictures and using Lightroom. You can apply your raw transformation in an editor of your choice, export your photos as TIFFs, and open them in a standalone version of Helicon Focus. This is also the workflow you would use if you weren’t editing in Lightroom. Then I put the blended image into Helicon Focus along with the images I took for the foreground and mid-ground. I usually do pre-exposure blending and save the result as a TIFF. This is the workflow I choose if I also have to do exposure blending for the background. This is where it gets interesting because Helicon Focus offers two workflows. The final step in the preparation is to synchronize the settings across all the images in the stack to create a seamless blend. In addition, I also moved the Dehaze slider to the left for forest shots, as it helps give those photos a more dreamy look. Sharpening is best done at the end of the processing and kept low during roughing to avoid too many artifacts. I just take raw photos, and I apply some standard tweaks to them, including increasing shadows and reducing highlights slightly, making slight adjustments to temperature and tone, removing lens distortions, and chromatic aberration as well as reduced sharpness. Preparing images in Lightroomīefore stacking some images, I usually prepare them in Lightroom. Aside from the first few steps, the workflow overlaps with the one in Lightroom, which I show below. If you want to use the standalone version also possible. Stacking Workflows in Helicon FocusĪs I wrote above, Helicon Focus comes with a Lightroom plugin, which is automatically installed, if you have Lightroom. Scenes like this, where I have to deal with foreground and background intersections, are often difficult to manually stack, without a clear line where I can draw the mask. An example is the photo below, where I have a fern from the foreground reaching into the background. Along with the autofocus of Canon R5, which allows me to shoot focus stacks very quickly, Helicon Focus allows me to deal with very complex landscape scenes. Helicon Focus is not only very intuitive to use with a beautiful interface, but its algorithms also work surprisingly well for my detailed photos of woodland from Costa Rica. I downloaded and installed it, put a complex pile of woods into Helicon’s Lightroom Plugin, and quickly stacked and retouched my first photo with it. Conveniently, Helicon Focus offers a 30 days trial with full functionality. After Alex Armitage mentioned it again in a comment under my handheld focus stacking post, I had to give it a try. I heard about Helicon Focus years ago but for some reason dismissed it. I needed a more convenient and precise way to piece everything together. Once I took my first pictures of the chaotic jungles of Costa Rica in Monteverde, I was able to afford manual stacking. For some such photos, the stacking can take me up to half an hour or even an hour. But especially when it comes to woodland photos, it can be difficult to find and combine the sharpest areas. And for most photos, this is a viable option. Acceptable sharpness is often not sharp enough for large prints that I want to sell.īecause of the limitations of Photoshop’s automatic stacking algorithm, which often results in uncorrected areas in the final image that need to be fixed, I usually do the stacking manually using masks in Photoshop. Using the super-sharp distance while trying to make everything acceptable with just one photo has always been too big of a compromise for me. And with Helicopter focus I found it.įor over 10 years, I have now stacked my landscape and architecture photos for optimal sharpness from foreground to background. This option has its limitations and since I recently had to work on some very complex stacks I had to look for a better solution. In this article, I share my field workflow, as well as the automatic stacking option Photoshop offers to stitch all the images together during photo editing. A few weeks ago I published an article here on Fstoppers about hand-held focus stacking.
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