Speedwell weed flower

Lord Vetinari

Some shots of a speedwell weed flower about 8mm diameter. The shot pair is a cross-eye stereogram. 5Dmk2/MPE-65/ 430Ex flash and focus stacked using zerene stacker DMap routine.

Brian V.

Andee

That is a pretty flower. It looks like it is made of sugar! Very pretty.

paddler4

Nice images. I particularly like the last. I'm curious about your opinion about DMap now that you are using it as well as PMax. So far, what I have found is that DMap does somewhat better with textures and saturation when doing flowers, but it creates worse halos if an edge is far forward of the surface behind it. The author of the software also says that it preserves less detail. If halos are not a problem, I use it more than PMax for flowers because I don't see the loss of detail.

Lord Vetinari

Thanks Andee and paddler for the comments

Paddler - not really used DMAp enough yet but it does seem good for flowers although I have had some messed up backgrounds from it, which are not really a problem (I just use the healing brush in PS to copy the stack back onto the last shot in the original series). The main advantage for me is that it doesn't seem to stack every single sensor spot . I still need to try helicon focus on some of these stacks.

Brian v.

paddler4

Brian,

Thanks. I think what you are referring to as messed up backgrounds may be related to the halos I mentioned--they show up as textureless areas in the backround right along the edges of the flower. Will be curious what you find with Helicon when you try it out.

Dan

Lord Vetinari

paddler4 wrote: »

Brian,

Thanks. I think what you are referring to as messed up backgrounds may be related to the halos I mentioned--they show up as textureless areas in the backround right along the edges of the flower. Will be curious what you find with Helicon when you try it out.

Dan

Ah - thimk I know what you mean, not quite the same as I got, I had blotches in the background not near the subject. You will often get a halo of blurred background around a foreground edge if both are in good focus. This is caused by the foreground blurred image being larger when the background is in focus so part of the background is masked.
If the background is a faily regular pattern you can use the cloning brush set at around 60% opacity to copy back onto the blur.

Brian V.

paddler4

Brian,

Thanks for the explanation and suggestion. I have an orchid at about 1.5:1 that I am going to use for trying out what you suggest.

Dan