Stacked!

[Andrew76]

Thanks Frank - great feedback. I'm still working on my 'touching up' skills. This aspect of the post processing has been the hardest for me to wrap my brain around for some reason. I know that DanK mentions that touching up the layers in the stack is quite easy and doable in Zerene, but with my bad experiences in CS5, I think that may be why I'm a little trigger-shy with the purchase. Maybe I'll just play around with some stacks to try my hand at the fine detail work.

Needless to say, I have not been very happy with my attempts recently, and although I managed one good shot of a little pink flower, I have to admit, I resorted back to upping the f-stop, and only shooting 3-4 images in the stack. My trials of keeping a low f number, and shooting upwards of 15 shots have all failed miserably, and with my lack of 'touching up' knowledge, I end up more frusterated than not.

I am going to try a couple more with CS today, then download the trial of Zerene tonight.

Thanks again for the help and encouragement!

[DanK]

Andrew,

There is a very good tutorial about retouching on the Zerene website, although Rik goes through far more complex approaches than are usually necessary. most often, all that I find necessary is this:

1. Go through the stacked image carefully (enlarging it helps) to look for artifacts, usually haloing on edges.
2. For each problematic place, find the photo in the stack that has the best image of that edge.
3. Select retouching.
4. Adjust the size of the retouching cursor as needed.
5. Paint from the single image over the problematic area.

Dan

[Glenn NK]

I never found any tutorials, but the instructions on the Zerene site were quite adequate for me to get the hang of it.

Lately I've been approaching the problem from a different angle:

I'm using smaller f/stops to increase the DOF - the problem with this is that it brings any background into "ugly" sharpness; and if the lens produces ugly bokeh it's in the background.

To solve this problem, I use Lightroom (I suspect ACR has the same tools) as follows:

1) using the Adjustment brush with Clarity set to minus 100, Noise to plus 100, and the Auto Mask setting checked, trace around the edges of the flower. This removes the noise from around the edges, and softens the areas that are obtrusive.

2) when the outlines of the flower are cleaned up, take a new brush with the same settings plus Sharpness set to minus 100 and "paint" the remainder of the BG. this un-sharpens the background - and even improves the bokeh of the background.

If I want a black background, I set the Exposure slider to minus 100 using the same procedures. This leaves the flower in full colour and the BG black (without having to resort to a black cloth in the field).

I'll try and find some examples tonight if you are interested.

Glenn

Found an example; the original was shot against a black cloth - however it wasn't completely black, and I wanted to get rid of the leaves and buds (and the edge of my white balance target ). It was shot at f/8 so that the DOF, although not great, serves the purpose. No stacking involved. Next time I'll shoot a single shot at f/16 (lens is a 100 macro).

Looking closely, some non-black areas can be seen in the first image - not sure how they would print, but why take a chance.




This image was cleaned up using the Adjustment Brush in Lightroom with settings as follows:
- Exposure minus 4
- Clarity minus 100
- Noise plus 100

I could have left in the one bud to the right of the iris.

[Andrew76]

Thanks Dan - that sounds a lot easier than dealing with layer masks in CS5. So, I think I will take the plunge, and let you know!

Glenn, thanks for the tips too. I have played around with the adjustment brush in the past, and do something very similar to what you've described. Guess I won't have to worry about large f numbers sharpening up my backgrounds any time soon - with this weather, everything will be taking place in my basement for a few months! I'll make sure everyone's good and sick of solid backgrounds before the winter's over!!

[Andrew76]

Dan, or Glenn, I've just purchased Zerene!! So, now the fun begins! I took your advice, and have uploaded some .tiff files. Do you recommend a size limit to the individual files? If I export my RAW images as .tiffs, I'm ending up with files around, and above 100MB, which is to be expected of course, but Zerene is taking quite a long time to process them.

Is this normal?

Yikes, I'm even having trouble re-touching. I've got 8GB of RAM, and no other programs open, and it's SLOW! I think something may be wrong.