In the Spotlight

Bill, Great job on stacking but soon you will realize that PS-CS5 is pathetic at stacking. Love the lighting here - soft and lighting the throat .

Nice take on the Calla Lily. Sorry to hear about the drought situation in Texas. Hope you get copious rains soon enough.

CS5 is fairly rudimentary, but is great for manual stacking, especially in outdoor situations with a slight (very slight!!) breeze blowing. I adjust slightly cropped photos in LR, moving the frame to get as perfectly aligned as possible. I have done as many as 5 this way, with over half doing well in both Helicon and CS5. I do the final alignment in CS5 in the layers panel, making invisible all but the bottom two layers. I turn the view of the top layer of the two to "difference" and use the arrow keys to align the images until I get a dark screen. I move up each layer that way. Sometimes there is rotational misalignment as well, which I do using the edit menu>transform>distort. It is time consuming, to say the least.

Bill:

Great to see you have started stacking. I used CZM inially, then CS5 but now do most of my stack in Helicon which really easy to use. Your first stack looks great and the selective lighting in the throat of this calla is very well done.

Now that you have upgraded to CS5 and started stacking, when are you going to get the scanner?

Oh no! You're on the slippery slope now Bill. As Gary suggests when's the scanner coming? Wait till Pat chimes in!! And then the pressure for radiographic images........

Nice view down the throat. Had to go to the larger version before I was sure about what I was seeing. I'd be tempted to tone down the highlight on the left just a tad so that I could see more details in the top of the petal. The stacking comments are interesting...so much to learn.

The stack looks pretty good Bill, but does have some typical CS5 errors. CS5 works OK under controlled shooting conditions if you don't have very closely-spaced areas at different distances, such as pine needles that you want to be in focus as well as their background. It looks like CS5 selects areas in sharp focus and leaves a feathered edge around them to blend in with the next image. As a result, I often have to do some manual repair work along edges.
In your image, you can see these edge problems along the lower edge of the petal, where the edges of the leaf behind it intersect the petal. Repairs involve using bits of the original in-focus images to replace the fuzzy and misalligned parts. Seems like this happens in more than half of the stacks I try to make (mainly because I only shoot outdoors, and sometimes don't even use a tripod), so I may end up spending the money for a dedicated stacking program one of these days. I don't know if that would really be necessary for controlled indoor shooting, however, unless those edge repairs become intollerable.

Nice light on that calla swirl Bill.

Bill,

I like this image very much. Your typical strong composition and accomplished pof, dof control.

I've never done a stack using CS5. I started with an eval of Helicon, you gave me a weekly EP for the image I worked with it (smile), and I never looked back. Helicon does occasionally create artifacts but it is incredibly simple to use. Most of my initial stacks were done outdoors. Several of my weekly picks are outdoor stacks. There's really only one kind of artifact if the stack succeeds. You'll see blurs in some cases where one edge overlays another plane. (Technically, the algorithms edge detection algorithm is failing.) I'd urge you to download Helicon and try it. You just need to keep a constant light level while you shoot the entire stack otherwise Helicon will warn you and my experience is that it's best to throw the images away in that case. Obviously several of us will be glad to answer any questions that we can. (smiile)

pat

Great job of creating a clear look down the throat of this flower but still keeping the BG blurred. I guess that's what stacking can do for you. Still have yet to try it; I don't have any program to do it at this point. Still so much I could learn. . .

Hi Bill Very fine results on your first stack!!!! The detail , light and color on this Calla are exceptional

A very artistic image, Bill! All of the elements work so well in this one. Superb work!