I visited the South shore of Lake Erie a few weeks ago and I found this exploding cattail along the road in the Ottawa NWR. What drew me to the photograph is the colorful foliage growing in with the cattails.
It was a cold and windy day and I wanted to focus on the cattail with a splash of color behind it. I decided to experiment and opened my aperture and focus stack. I shot a total of 8 photos and I used 5 photos in this stack.
To stack, I downloaded trial copies of Zerene and Helicon. The difference in the result is big. As you can imagine, with the wind the cattail in each shot was all over the place. Zerene somehow selected the cattail as the focus point and aligned them into a single object. The OOF BG became more abstract. Helicon gave me multiple cattails. I will be purchasing Zerene.
I want to give a shout out to @kris_smith for sharing her valuable experience in focus stacking. I wouldn’t have considered this experiment without it.
Specific Feedback Requested
I have not finished editing, so this is an ongoing project. I wanted to share my experience and get your input on improvements
Technical Details
Canon 5DSR | EF100 Macro | f4 | 1/800s | ISO 400
Processed using ACR and Photoshop
Stacked using Zerene P Max
Hey David, I’m so glad you got out and tried some new stuff. It’s always good to stretch and eventually with practice, I think stacking is going to work out well. This shot though has some issues -
Mostly it has to do with movement - the wind shifted this cattail around and Zerene didn’t align the shots perfectly. Sometimes it’s a lost cause.
Also there aren’t enough photos to catch the whole of the subject from front to back, something that I’ve had happen to me on more than one occasion. Here’s a recent blog post about how I salvaged a shot when I got lazy -
And that brings me to the background. You say that you used a PMax final image, but you don’t say if you did any retouching. Backgrounds in a PMax are going to be more jagged and weird simply because you can’t do any contrast restriction with that method. With DMap you can and that will make Zerene ignore contrast changes in certain areas of the photo which will result in smoother backgrounds. The link above also talks about this and how I use it to achieve better backgrounds which reduces my overall retouching time by a lot.
I hope this doesn’t discourage you. This is a really tough subject in two regards - first that it’s tall and moves around all the time. Movement is a killer in stacking. Second it’s a very deep subject front to back and requires more images to get all the bits in focus. If you also want a smooth background this means a wider aperture and that means even more photos might be needed to get all of the cattail sharp. It’s sort of the perfect storm of difficulty, but I see why you tried. It’s very cool and I like the colors in the back to set it off.
A beautiful subject! These cattails are like snowflakes – no two alike. Good start on this stacking stuff! It’s a great tool!
I start my stack a little in front of the closest point (in-camera stepping) and try to choose enough frames and the right step spacing to cover the subject and then a little. If chimping the last frame shows I didn’t go far enough, I can start another stack from that focus point. (I’m in back button focus so I can start the stack with the remote shutter and, although the camera has to be in AF, it will start from where I set it.
Zerene can often make up for a little movement but it has limits. It’s great if the whole subject moves a little against a fairly featureless BG. It’s usually easy to clone out a few glitches and often works well to mask in (in PS) one of the OOF BG files that matches the subject closely enough that you can mask without obvious mismatch. Sometimes a 50% (etc) brush on parts of the mask will give a good edge.
