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Ron Conlon
07-23-2014, 12:16 PM
11 images focus series, stacked in Zerene
Lightbox, remote flash, artificial background, tripod D5100 200mm f6.3 1/200 iso100

Jonathan Ashton
07-24-2014, 04:19 PM
It is afine image very clear and sharp. Something appears slightly strange about the bit under the flower is it the sepal? The pale green bit, it appears to have a soft outline. Only a minor point but I think stacked images attract a very critical eye - hope you don't mind!

Ron Conlon
07-24-2014, 04:37 PM
Critique is why I post here, Jon, for matters both small and large. There was an ant exploring the flower while I acquired the stack, and my imperfect deletion of it in Photoshop resulted in the funny bit with the soft outline. I should have retouched it in Zerene where I could have chosen a frame from the stack without the ant for repair. You are quite right about this type of photo--studio setup and stack--that imperfections attract the eye.

Ron Conlon
07-24-2014, 07:34 PM
Here is a restacked and reprocessed image with the ant properly deleted and the contrast better handled, I think. After reading some of the documentation for Zerene I moved away from the default settings which were modifiying the dymanic range and increasing contrast/sharpness to levels I wasn't comfortable with.

Diane Miller
07-27-2014, 11:24 PM
Yes, a little less tone mapping here -- nicer! I might think about having the stem less sharp, but it does show how daylilies grow.

I haven't delved far enough into Zerene -- is this PMax or DMap?

Ron Conlon
07-28-2014, 06:12 AM
Good point on having an out-of-focus stem, I took that approach on the dill photo that followed, and it could have been used here to make it more pleasing.
This was a PMax stack, which tends to generate more contrast. I don't think I generated stacks with the other methods when I did this one.
Lately I have been stacking with both PMax and DMap, and also generating a UDR version (with is PMax, but without changes to the dynamic range). I open them all in PS and decide which version I like. With the three for comparison, although this is a small sample, I usually now find the DMap version most pleasing, though not always.
The software (Mac version) lacks a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and the keyboard shortcuts that are there aren't hinted at in the menus (like changing the retouching brush size--you can, but you need to read the documentation to find out how) but it is very solid, and the interface for retouching (choosing which photo in a stack you want as the source) is intutive and powerful.