Water Lily

[Steaphany]

Here is a macro shot that I did of a new water lily leaf floating on the surface, drops from the previous night's rain reflecting the sun:



Newly growing leaves have this deep burgundy color.

Taken with my Sigma SD14 at ISO 100, 1/200th, f/6.3, Sunlight White Balance, through a Sigma 18-50mm DC EX lens set to 43mm with manual focus. The long depth of field is the result of focal blending 6 exposures. This is the uncropped processed image, the border is an artifact from the alignment process.

[rogerb]

This is a great shot.
Is TuFuse capable of handling raw files directly or do you have to convert them to tiff? Can it handle 16-bit images?

[Steaphany]

TuFuse Pro provides a GUI front end to TuFuse the freeware command line engine that does all the work. If installed, TuFuse will call dcraw when needing to process RAW files. TuFuse natively reads JPG and both 8 bit and 16 bit TIF files.

The process flow for the Water Lily photo used Sigma Photo Pro to perform the initial manipulations which then saved the images as 16 bit TIF files.

Since a breeze had the water lily leaf moving about the water and due to my Sigma 18-50mm DC EX lens cause some zoom drift, the image magnification changed with the focus adjustment, TuFuse failed to properly align the images on my first attempts. I used Photoshop to perform the alignment of the stack of images, which were saved off again in 16 bit TIFs.

I then loaded the pre-aligned images into TuFuse Pro which created the focus blended image.

As a final step, I used Photoshop to create a levels adjustment layer to bring out the original contrast.

Here are the documentation links for TuFuse and TuFuse Pro

[Yan Zhang]

This is an interesting picture. The central focus of this image is presented very well. I feel the only thing is that the leaf at the left lower corner a bit interfered.

[rogerb]

Thanks for the info. This is something I've been fascinated with.

With the quality of lens and high sensor resolution available now, diffraction severely limits how small you can make the aperture and still have a very sharp image. This process seems to be about the only way to get excellent dof while minimizing diffraction effects.

Cheers,
Roger