If you want to use the stand-alone version that's also possible. Scenes like this, where I have to deal with intersections between foreground and background, are typically hard to stack manually, if there's no clear line along which I can draw the mask.Īs I already wrote above, Helicon Focus comes with a Lightroom plugin, which is automatically installed, if you have Lightroom. An example is the photo below where I have the fern from the foreground reach into the background. Together with the automatic focus bracketing of the Canon R5, which allows me to capture focus stacks very quickly, Helicon Focus enables me to tackle very complex landscape scenes.
Not only is Helicon Focus very intuitive to use with a nice interface, but its algorithms also worked surprisingly well for my detailed woodland photos from Costa Rica. I downloaded and installed it, fed a complex woodland stack into Helicon's Lightroom Plugin, and in a breeze stacked and retouched my first photo with it.
Helicon focus vs photoshop full#
Very conveniently, Helicon Focus offers a 30 day trial with full functionality. After Alex Armitage mentioned it again in a comment under my handheld focus stacking article I had to give it a try. I had already heard of Helicon Focus many years ago but for some reason dismissed it. I needed a more convenient and precise way to piece everything together.
Helicon focus vs photoshop manual#
Once I had taken the first photos of the chaotic Costa Rican forest in Monteverde, I had enough of manual stacking. For some such photos, the stacking can take me as much as half an hour or even an hour. But especially when it comes to woodland photos it can be tricky to find and combine the sharpest areas. And for most photos, this is a viable option. Acceptably sharp is usually not sharp enough for the large prints I like to sell.īecause of the limitations of Photoshop's automatic stacking algorithm, which often leads to unsharp areas in the final photo that need to be fixed, I usually perform the stacking manually using masks in Photoshop. Using the hyperfocal distance while trying to get everything acceptably sharp with just one photo was always too much of a compromise for me. For more than 10 years I've now been stacking my landscape and architecture photos to achieve optimal sharpness from foreground to background.
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