Macro with Pano Tools

[Carl_Constantine]

A photography friend of mine (and professor at the local Univserity here) asked me to post this to the forums. He makes reference to an article written by our very own Rik Littlefield

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If you have read this:

http://www.janrik.net/ptools/ExtendedFo ... index.html


you know you can stack images together to enhance macro depth of
field.

Today I implemented the feature in a program called PTmasker (part of
panotools.sourceforge.net)

PTmasker now supports this feature. It requires a sequence of TIFFs as
input and generate a sequence of TIFFs with masks enabled. THis is the
proposed workflow:

../../tools/PTmasker -e 5 -z -m2 -w 4 -s 4 -f -p mask tiffs*.tif
../../tools/PTtiff2psd mask*.tif
rm -f tiffs*.tif mask*.tif

This will generate a Photoshop file called merged.psd


THe new options for PTmasker are:

-z enable it
-m <value> type of mask
-w size of focusing window
-s size of smoothing window

defaults to -m2, -w4 -s4 iff and -z is enabled.

if -z is enabled, -e should also be provided.

Run it without parameters to see what it does.


the final result looks a bit "bubbly" (see

http://www.janrik.net/ptools/ExtendedFo ... index.html

I recommend to copy the bottom layer (the one with the nicest
background bokeh) to the top layer, and then mask it completely, and
selectively renable the mask for those areas that look "ugly".


Finally, you might need to first "align" all the images properly. I
recommend using hugin to do that.

dmg




--
Daniel M. German "Research is what I'm doing
W. Von Braun -> when I don't know what I'm doing."
http://turingmachine.org/
http://silvernegative.com/
dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca
replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .

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[rjlittlefield]

Interesting how these things get around. I exchanged email just this morning with Daniel about how to improve that capability.

As background, note that Daniel German has been doing some really fine development work recently with the Panorama Tools software -- reorganizing old code and writing some new code to make all functions available in open source multi-platform packages.

The extended-depth-of-field software that I added to Panorama Tools (PT) was essentially a quick-and-dirty experiment, done over two years ago at a time when (IMHO) none of the other free or inexpensive software really did a very good job with my insect-size subjects.

The PT experiment worked surprisingly well, an outcome that I eventually attributed to PT's ability to properly scale and align the source images before trying to do pixel selection. (It's a coincidence that I posted about that same issue just last night, in my telecentrics topic over in the Techniques forum.)

Since the time that I put extended-depth-of-field into PT, similar alignment capabilities have been added to both Helicon Focus and CombineZ5. For routine stacking, both of those packages now do better work, faster, than my PT stuff. That could change in the future, but for now I'd recommend using PT for stacking only if somebody has some compelling reason to do that.

--Rik

[Carl_Constantine]

...but for now I'd recommend using PT for stacking only if somebody has some compelling reason to do that.

Like lack of money :-)

[rjlittlefield]

...but for now I'd recommend using PT for stacking only if somebody has some compelling reason to do that.

Like lack of money :-)

Well, CombineZ5 is free too.

At the moment, I can't think what a compelling reason would be, unless maybe to play with the source code. CombineZ5 is open source also, but it might not be as easy to work with.

--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

...can't think what a compelling reason would be...

I thought of one: stacking under native *n*x.

The open-source Panorama Tools, including my extended-depth-of-field stuff, are all reputed to work under Unix et.al.

I haven't tried that personally -- all of my current work is with Windows.

--Rik

[Carl_Constantine]

...can't think what a compelling reason would be...

I thought of one: stacking under native *n*x.

The open-source Panorama Tools, including my extended-depth-of-field stuff, are all reputed to work under Unix et.al.

I haven't tried that personally -- all of my current work is with Windows.

Yes, Daniel is an Open Source advocate and Linux (and Mac OS X) user, so PTools works in all OS'. I also have/use Linux and but most of my work lately is with Windows also.