I got a new camera recently with a dedicated macro lens and want to stack my images. I do have a cheap focus stacking software, but it is not very good. I thought I’d try helicon instead as I have heard good things about it.
Problem is, as I’m doing handheld stacks, the images aren’t perfectly aligned. How do I do this?
I am using a Macbook with an apple chip and the newest MacOS version. The two methods I found online don’t work for me. Hugin will not open, and Photoshop is too expensive for me. Is there any other way? Help would be very much appreciated!
Which one is that? There’s a free, open-source utility called ChimpStackr that does automatic alignment and stacking. I have used it quite a lot and it works pretty well with photos that aren’t hugely misaligned. The only real problem with it is that on some platforms it can be very slow to start up (20-30 seconds on my Linux system). Other than that, though, it’s very simple to use: just select a bunch of images, click a button to process them, and view the results. If you can’t afford proprietary software, it’s well worth trying. (I also tried Gimp, but it’s much more complicated to use).
It takes some practice to make good stacks if you’re doing it handheld. Helicon is good software and will work with misaligned images to a point. There are settings you can tweak (See Helicon forums / user groups) to accommodate greater degrees of movement, but at some point the camera has moved too much between shots (and thus the perspective changed) to be able to create a workable stack.
Helicon has a 30-day free trial, so you can keep all your source images for awhile, then run them all through the software once you activate the trial. This will give you an idea of whether it will work for you.
Thank you, I guess I was confused because it couldn’t stack any of my stacks, while my other program (simply called Focus Stacker) could. So perhaps my sense of which stack is aligned well enough and which isn’t is a bit off.
I guess I do have to practice quite a bit still.
I watched a video tutorial where someone showed how to change these settings, but they simply weren’t there for me. Generally, the whole program seemed a but buggy (zooming into images didn’t work either). Are these settings perhaps not available on the free trial?
As mentioned above, it’s called „Focus Stacker“ (it cost 20€ on the Mac AppStore). It does the alignment very well, but there are a lot of stacking artefacts and it seems to warp proportions and features a bit (like photoshop‘s stacker).
I‘ll check out ChimpStackr though, thanks for the link! :)
Also, regarding proprietary software I don’t really have an issue with paying for software to a point, but I refuse to get a subscription.
Without seeing what you’re looking at, I couldn’t say. As far as I recall, the free trial of Helicon Focus is the full software. I have never had any issues with zooming or buggy behavior under Windows. You should be on Helicon Focus 8.2.x
At some point in the past, I’ve used CombineZM, which is a free program designed for microscope z-stacks but also works with other kinds of images. Here’s an article comparing it with Helicon. I don’t know if it’s available for Macs though.
It can do alignments to some extent. I found when it struggles I can sometimes still get results with Photoshop (which I fortunately can get access to through work), but even with that some stacks are just too far off. Sometimes it helps to manually crop to about the same frame before attempting the alignment in the program. However, at the close and far range of the stack where most of the image is out-of-focus, it fails because it doesn’t have enough reference points for the alignment.
I’ve had my best results after paying close attention on the front end during shooting the images, e.g. using a tripod or bracing the camera against a solid support to avoid too much variation between individual frames and thus minimizing the need for alignment. Not surprisingly, it works best when focusing through top to bottom on a microscope slide where nothing shifts except for the focus.
