CamRanger came yesterday

[chauncey]

http://camranger.com/...not exactly plug-and-play. My geeky son had to change some bios settings
(whatever that is) to connect my Canon 1Ds3...it does tend to use up the battery quickly.
Still get some artifacts in stacking using PS CC, gotta find better software for that??

[Kodiak]

…Still get some artifacts in stacking using PS CC, gotta find better software for that??

I love the light here Chauncey!
Maybe you want to investigate "Helicon Focus"

[Manfred M]

Strange - mine connected quite easily and I had no real technical issues at all. I don't quite understand why you are using it for closeup work as it is really designed for use at a considerable distance from the camera.

[IzzieK]

Manfred...he just received his Christmas present, be gentle with him...

[chauncey]

I love the light here Chauncey!
Maybe you want to investigate "Helicon Focus"

Thanks Kodiak...I'm going to do that today.

Manfred, close-up stuff is the reason I bought it, ordered a motorized head to go with it for panos.
Do you find that it eats batteries?

[DanK]

Chauncey,

BIOS=basic input-output system, I think.

Re stacking: try Zerene. Really. I have no connection with them, so I am not self-interested, but it is a superb program for macro work of the type you do. The majority of macro photographers I know use it. I haven't used anything else since I first tried it.

When doing flowers, the algorithm used to stack really matters. Zerene has two that perform quite differently, and you can merge from one of them to the other. You can also easily retouch from any image in the stack. The fellow who wrote it has some excellent tutorials on the web that show you how to do this. When I have problems with artifacts, I now routinely stack both ways (one command to do both), then paint from the PMax composite, which has fewer artifacts and preserves fine detail best, onto a DMap composite, which does better at preserving colors and subtle textures.

The newest version has a nice addition: a plug-in for lightroom. It makes it remarkably easy. I do the very basic edits in LR--anything I want to do in raw format, like color balance, then tell the plug-in to export them. You can select the format, but I use 16-bit TIFFs in Prophoto. LR exports them and opens zerene. When I save the composite, I go back to LR.

I have to travel a lot over the next two weeks, but if you try it, I would be happy to try to answer questions about it when I am back.

Dan

[Manfred M]

Manfred, close-up stuff is the reason I bought it, ordered a motorized head to go with it for panos.
Do you find that it eats batteries?

I ordered a spare battery with mine and have never had to use it; the CamRanger itself seems to be very gentle on its batteries. As for the camera batteries, they seem to drain a touch faster, but I always have a few spares with me, so no problem there either.

The one issue I'm still trying to deal with is effective range. It's good if there is a clear line of sight, but it can drop of more quickly than expected when shooting through walls.