I've done a few focus stacks before, using focus adjustment of the lens (as opposed to lens positioning), controlled by a CamRanger.
This is my first post to the Photomacrography forums. I'm interested in general thoughts & impressions, constructive criticism, etc. Not so much from the subject perspective - this was just something that was literally lying around and I figured would make a fine test subject - but from a technical. For example, I had quite a bit of trouble getting workable lighting. My first few attempts had the light set such that the individual frames of the stack were correctly lit, and were just missing the extended depth of field. But stacking those with ZereneStacker resulted in truly horrible artifacting, haloes, and so forth. It took quite some effort and trial-and-error to come up with a lighting setup that was sufficiently flat for ZereneStacker to handle more-or-less okay, while still retaining enough fine contrast to bring out the detail.
And yes, I realise that this is something of a mundane subject. But in my defence, at least it's not another fruit fly.
(click the image to view the image's Flickr page, where you can access full-size originals etc)
Composed of 61 exposures, at minimum [manual-]focusing distance (?1:1 reproduction) on a Sigma 105/2.8. On a D7100. Base ISO (100) of course.
Stacking created using a Stackshot 3X + Extended Stackshot Rail, from Cognisys, using 100µm steps.
Original images processed using DxO Optics Pro 10, with basically its default settings (main difference being that I enabled PRIME noise removal).
Images stacked using ZereneStacker, PMax method. A fair bit of manual retouching done in ZereneStacker to clean up the outside edge (mainly removing haloes), and to blur out the surface under the raisin (by choosing out-of-focus sections of it, rather than in-focus ones).
Lighting provided in a small part by ambient daylight, but mostly by a pair of Nikon SB-R200 flashes (from the Nikon R1 system) with the R1's diffusion panel in-between, as well as the diffusion caps fitted to both flashes. Flashes were placed above the panel, which was itself above the raisin, at about 10:30 & 1:30 o'clock, roughly perpendicular to the camera.
Some retouching in Aperture:
- Cleaning up the raisin's edges with the clone tool.
- Slight edge sharpening.
- Strong noise reduction on the background and the raisin's shadow.
- A saturation boost.
- A wibbly wobbly levels adjustment (mainly to increase contrast slightly and lift the mid-tones).