Focus Blending using Adobe Photoshop CS4

[augusthouse]

Thanks Rik,

Here is the CS4 aligned, HF result with the settings disabled as mentioned in your post.


CS4 aligned, layers exported as individual images, stacked in Helicon Focus

Craig

[augusthouse]

The images in my last two posts consisted of 32 image slices from a Nikon D100 (6MP); RAW>TIF (32mb); yet CS4 consistantly fell over during the focus blend stage (even with workarounds applied); so in order to see if the error message I was receiving was accurate and not just CS4's general response to a 'processing bump' I began working with DNG files (17mb) and JPEGS - it completed its task admirably; but I keep wondering how it would handle large numbers of images from higher end DSLRs?

The main problem with CS4, unless I'm missing something, which is highly likely, is it's system resource mangement. I have a respectable 32bit computer system running Vista; but I'd like to hear from anyone running CS4 in a 64bit environment or on an Intel Mac.

Craig

[elf]

I'm having a hard time getting anything usable out of CS4. This is a gear I'm making for a geared head to replace my ball head. I didn't remove the swarf, so it looks a lot worse than it actually is. The threads are 1/4-20 which makes the ridges 1.27mm apart.

I used the El-Nikkor 50mm 1:2.8 at f5.6 and 30mm bellows extension.


At first glance it looks good, but closer inspection shows lost detail on nearly every piece of swarf and behind each ridge.

Here's a single frame from the stack:


After blending and adding other layers for manual blending, the file size is 8.3gb.