mvPhotos

There is this interesting piece of software that I checked out. It is called Helicon Focus. What it does is it “creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas”. According to the website “the program is designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem.”

So to try it out I did some macro shots of a toy car and manually moved the focus from the front to the back and took shots as I went along. To keep the camera steady I had it mounted on a tripod.

Here is the first of the frames - the front tip of the car:

After moving the focus ring of the lens (a Canon 50mm F1.8) and taking a shot as I went along I arrive at the rear of the car in focus:

Now, after loading up all the images in Helicon Focus and pressing the Run button, I have this:

Perfect, isn’t it? The software works like a wonder. Note that the above photos have not been cropped. This is important because technically we could get the whole car in focus by using a higher aperture or simply by putting some more distance between the car and camera.

During the making of my first feature (Home Lighting Experiment 1) I also did a session of macro photography to try out Helicon focus on the Orchids. Here’s how it went:

I mounted a 4x close-up, which narrows the depth of field significantly:

Then I started focused on the front petal of one of the orchids:

After taking many shots as I moved the focus point I got the petal at the end nicely in focus:

Then I selected the photos in Helicon Focus and ran them and here’s what I got:

Not too bad. Of course, my subjects are not that interesting for this kind of photography. An insect such as a dragon fly would have made a much more interesting subject. The above 3 photos are all full-frames, not crops.

You can download a 30-day trial version of Helicon Focus from www.heliconsoft.com.

If you do try it out then show us your results by posting them to the MvPhotos group on Flickr.

Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoyed that.