A few recent favorites from stacking practice

I'm still very new to the world of focus stacking, and although I believe I understand the flaws in these attempts, I think they still came out okay. My main issue right now is making sure the slices are thick enough without relying on overly narrow apertures that will cause diffraction. I did not do this very well with the spider pic (wide aperture, not enough slices).

These have all been stacked using CombineZP, and although I think it has been doing a nice job, I will probably upgrade to Zerene soon. Zerene's ability to allow you to quickly paint slices or other stacks onto an output file is something I feel would really help me.

All of these were shot at around 1:1 with the Canon 100mm macro (non-L).

Thanks for looking

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The first stack is excellent in my opinion. It it all sharp and I cannot see any odd artifacts.

Actually the first three are excellent. The final shot I am not so sure about.

Great work.

BasAndrews wrote in post #13574047
The first stack is excellent in my opinion. It it all sharp and I cannot see any odd artifacts.

Actually the first three are excellent. The final shot I am not so sure about.

Great work.

Thanks, Bas. It's interesting, because although I agree that the last one looks a little funny (perhaps too noisy or over-sharpened), the individual slices have that same odd look to them, even at 100% on the detailed parts of each slice. I think the problem is that I misted the sunflower with water right before doing that shot, so all the details are somewhat obscured by tiny drops of water that appear somewhat like noise or haloing. If I had it to do over again, I definitely would not have misted it, but given that the noisy/over-sharpened look appears to be native to the subject/light combination and not the processing, I have decided that I like it.

Of course, I could just be deceiving myself into accepting sub par work, but I think we all do that from time to time. I know I do.

These are all great. What kind of stack did you do, just load the images and press a couple buttons, or did you do something more complex. I have yet to get anything that looks close to this good. And how thick were your slices?

canonloader wrote in post #13575455
These are all great. What kind of stack did you do, just load the images and press a couple buttons, or did you do something more complex. I have yet to get anything that looks close to this good. And how thick were your slices?

Thanks a lot, Mitch. These were all shot with a tripod, so that helped. On the spider one in particular, I did not pay much attention to the thickness of the slices, so I ended up with some out-of-focus planes between a couple slices. On the rest, I followed this procedure using live view on my T2i, starting with the part of the subject that was closest to the lens. I used apertures around f/8-f/11 depending on which photo you're looking at.

I zoomed in to 5x in live view and manually focused so that the plane I wanted was in focus. Then, I used a remote trigger and mirror lockup to trigger the exposure with little to no vibration of the camera. After the shot was saved to the camera, I re-opened live view and just barely turned the focus ring on the lens to move what was in focus from where it had been to just beyond that. However, In the case of the sea shell (the most recent and probably sharpest of the shots), I didn't pay much attention to the live view, but instead I tried to turn the focus ring as little as I possibly could while still being aware that I had turned it at all. This seemed to work pretty well and ended up producing a pretty sharp shot. I don't know if this turn-as-little-as-possible technique would work in every application, but it worked great with the shell. I'm sure this sort of imprecision would not work at the kinds of high magnifications that many (especially you!) on this forum use, but it seems to work pretty well at 1:1.

For stacking, I used the "all methods" choice in CombineZP. That means that the software did separate stacks using all 6-8 (can't remember exactly how many) methods of which it is capable. I just chose the best-looking one in each case. Interestingly, the stacking technique that worked best varied noticeably across the photos. There were always at least a few outputs in each case that were full of artifacts, ghosting, and other errors, but there were also a few that looked pretty good. I think "do stack" was the one I used in two out of the four, I used "soft stack" once, and I used "pyramid high constrast" (or something like that...) in the other. I'm afraid I can't remember which goes with which, though.

I was lucky in that I did not have to do any editing after the stacks were done other than a little unsharp mask in GIMP and a little cropping to eliminate mirroring on the edges. However, I'm sure that as I experiment more with stacking, I'm going to start wanting to merge layers and stacks in the way that Zerene allows. I know you can do the same thing with Photoshop or GIMP, but I'm not willing to put in the time those interfaces require for such a task.

Thanks for the explanation, that helps me a lot. Would you say the slices were thin? I think my problem with the microscope has been that all slices were not exactly the same thickness. And maybe to thick, so there was some OOF-ness in between slices. I know stacking will really help my own images, If I can just get it right.

canonloader wrote in post #13575930
Thanks for the explanation, that helps me a lot. Would you say the slices were thin? I think my problem with the microscope has been that all slices were not exactly the same thickness. And maybe to thick, so there was some OOF-ness in between slices. I know stacking will really help my own images, If I can just get it right.

Well, the slices were pretty thin in that the in-focus part of the subject in each photo was only a small fraction of the total subject size. I would think with the microscope you would probably want to try a similar method to my shell method in that you turn the dial as little as possible each time while ensuring that you turned it at all. I would think just to get the front half of a single cell in focus would require at least 100-200 shots, but that's based on seeing people do 150-shot stacks of jumping spiders that only get the head in focus.

I'll say this: your chosen form of photography is too tough for me! I think I'll stick to 1:1 where us mortals still have a chance

Yes, in another forum, I have seen micro photos with 275 images in a stack. Mind boggling.

My fine focus dial has a very fine set of marks that are supposed to be 1µm separation. It's just a matter of remembering to use them. LOL I will be trying again soon before my Zerene trial runs out.

1 & 2 are my favorite. Lovely colors and detail.

#2 is super.

Stacks all look very good !

Brian V.

Thanks for all the comments, folks.

By the way, in case any of you were wondering about why that spider is missing a leg (did anyone notice?), I assure you I had nothing to do with it. I came outside that morning, and I saw this spider that had wedged itself into the corner of a windowsill and was not moving. It stayed so still that I managed enough natural-light shots of it to do the stack. It wasn't until I saw the finished product that I realized (a) that it was missing a leg, and (b) recovery from said injury is probably why it was staying so still in the first place. I can say that later that day it had moved on, so I guess it wasn't too worse for wear.

Spiders don't recover, they molt and a new legs comes with the new skin.

canonloader wrote in post #13579029
Spiders don't recover, they molt and a new legs comes with the new skin.

Fascinating. You learn something new every day. Sure would be nice if people could do that as well.

Your stacking method is rather more precise than mine. My most common method when the magnification is ~1:1 or less, is to move back and forth with the camera until the focus plane is just in front of the subject, then hold down the shutter on continuous shooting, and slowly move forward until the focus is off the back of the subject. If I'm lucky, the camera buffer fills up just as I get to the back of the subject. That's much quicker than trying individually focus each slice.

At higher mags, I use a rail, and move the camera forward a bit between each shot, rather than adjusting the lens focus.