QuestionFocus stacking spring wildflowers: in-camera focus shift or Helicon?

Spring ephemerals are up in the woods behind our place (trout lilies and bloodroot!) and I want to do better than last year. Z6 III with the 105 MC. Last year I hand-shot five or six frames and stacked them in Photoshop, and the results were okay but there was always some smearing around the petal edges and the stamens.

This year I'm using the Z6 III's focus shift shooting, which spits out a folder of frames. Question is whether it's worth paying for Helicon Focus or Zerene to stack them, or if Photoshop is good enough and I just need better technique. Also, how many frames are you all using for a flower at roughly 1:2? I tried 40 at step width 3 and it felt like overkill. Wind is the real enemy of course!

Yes to Helicon (or Zerene if you enjoy fiddling with retouching, which I do, obviously). The petal-edge smearing you're describing is the classic Photoshop thing around high-contrast edges, it's basically auto-blending layer masks and it was never really built for this. In Helicon I run both Method B and Method C on anything with messy overlapping stamens and pick whichever looks less haunted (B is usually cleaner on smooth petals, C copes better with fine overlapping bits but halos more).

For a flower at 1:2 around f/5.6, 40 frames at step 3 is more than you need. Try step 5 or 6 and 15-20 frames and see if you can spot banding. In-camera stacking on my OM-5 is honestly good enough for most stuff, it merges the frames right there in the camera, which feels like cheating, and I'm fine with cheating.

Wind: a clear plastic tub with the bottom cut off makes a little greenhouse over the flower, or a patient friend holding a sheet of cardboard (patient friends not included).

salticid said:

a clear plastic tub with the bottom cut off

I love this. Our recycling bin is about to get raided! Will try step 5 this weekend.

Photoshop's stacking is a layer-mask hack, not a stacking engine. Zerene's PMax is better on fine detail and has proper retouching tools, though it does exaggerate noise and contrast a little, so start from clean low-ISO raws and do your sharpening after the stack, never before. Export 16-bit TIFFs, not JPEGs. Most of the stacking artefacts I see posted are from people feeding 8-bit, already-sharpened JPEGs into it.

I have never stacked anything in my life, and my little Lumix does the focus bracketing and blends it inside the camera for me. For the snowdrops and hellebores in our garden it is perfectly adequate. Perhaps I am easily pleased.

F

Bloodroot! Now that's a flower name with some attitude. I use Helicon for stacked landscapes, same idea. The trial is free, so run this weekend's batch through it before you pay anybody anything. Only gripe I've got is it'll happily make a beautiful stack out of frames where the wind moved one petal, so check the edges at 100% before you go bragging. Ask me how I know. Actually, don't.

Follow-up: step 5, 18 frames, Helicon trial, and the stamen edges are SO much cleaner. Wind still won about half the time, but the plastic tub trick saved a couple. A cardinal sat on the fence and watched me the entire time, I think he was judging. Thanks all, buying the license.

Yay! Welcome to the stacking hole (it's very deep (and full of spiders)).