R5 - focus stacking - ACDSee

[tunewitsch]

A week ago I took my gear (R5, RF100mm, lightweight tripod, remote controller) to the local botanical garden in order to explore and learn about focus bracketing. I have been using ACDSee (currently Ultimate 2022) as my favorite (and unique) photo editor for as long as I can remember. Here I want to report that ACDSee does an excellent job in assembling a composite image (examples below) from focus-bracketed images.
The processing time used by ACDSee is quite reasonable, and I guess - based on my (limited) experience with DPP - that it may be significantly shorter than the time needed by DPP. I may eventually perform a quantitative comparison in the future.

Example 1: 12 individual shots. Top to bottom: first image, last image, assembled composite.

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Example 2: 8 individual shots. Top to bottom: first image, last image, assembled composite.

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Example 3: 7 individual shots. Top to bottom: first image, last image, assembled composite. It is amazing how ACDSee manages to handle this complex pattern of interlaced plant elements to achieve the final composite in a fully automated way not calling for any user intervention. The latter feature may actually also be a curse since it means that user intervention is not possible.

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[Kwazy]

That's great. I love ACDSee and especially their LightEQ and ColorEQ editors.
Didn't know it can stack now. Will definitely check it out. Helicon and Photoshop both leave me a lot of retouching to do...

 

[tunewitsch]

Nice to read that there are other people out there who like ACDSee, which somehow combines the best (all of?) LR and PS. Since you like their EQs, you may also appreciate their EQwheel. It is quite practical to work on selective color (ranges).

 

[Kwazy]

Can we zoom into this region? How did ACDSee handle overlapping in-focus planes? That's usually the hardest part and I've had to do a lot of manual collaging to fix such areas.

 

[tunewitsch]

>Can we zoom into this region?
Not sure I understand the question. Yes, of course one can zoom, but do you want ME to zoom?

> How did ACDSee handle overlapping in-focus planes?
That's a good question that only the software developers at ACDSee can answer ;-) I am not an experienced layer editor, and would have a hard time doing the merge by myself...

If you wish I can share (tomorrow) a link to the individual pictures. I would be interested in seeing the composite that you achieve with your favorite method.

 

[Kwazy]

Yes, of course one can zoom, but do you want ME to zoom?

I'm sorry. I'll be less ambiguous from now on.
Yes, I'd like to see a higher resolution version of that region so I can see how ACDSee handled that part. Please share it if you don't mind.
The other software I've used would leave a blurry halo around the nearer layer that I would have to fix manually. From the downsized version it looks like ACDSee may have handled that very well.

> How did ACDSee handle overlapping in-focus planes?
That's a good question that only the software developers at ACDSee can answer ;-)

I meant if it succeeded or failed - difficult to see from your pictures : )

 

[tunewitsch]

Hi Mike, I have put the original images together with the composite into a Onedrive folder. You may download them from https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsXO8QrhJiHKjNhAGqOF4nOjZxXm5w?e=g7MLea
Please inform me when you have downloaded the pics, so that I can free the storage space.
Eager to see what you can do with it. On my W10-PC (i9-11thGen @ 3.5 GHz, 16GB RAM) ACDSee takes 83 seconds to produce the composite.

 

[Kwazy]

Thanks, Antoine.

This turned out to be an interesting and useful experiment. Below are comparisons of two select parts from your photograph stacked using Helicon Focus, ACDSee, and Photoshop. I think Helicon is a clear winner here, but I'd like to hear the thoughts of others as well.

A couple of things that jump out:
First row: Photoshop adds a wider and more noticeable blur around the front layer. Helicon is a bit tidier than ACDSee, but both are better than Photoshop here.
Second row: ACDSee adds halos around the yellow pollen spots, and Photoshop's is a little blurry - perhaps the wrong layer is selected. The edge of the leaf with the bristles is also much blurrier for Photoshop. ACDSee seems to have jumbled up the bristles a bit, Helicon again is tidier.

I've been using Photoshop and spending a lot of time cleaning up those edges, because it is a lot more powerful when it comes to editing and layer control. Perhaps the compromise is to stack in Helicon, then align the stacked image with constituent layers in Photoshop and add the final touches in places that Helicon inevitably misses. Editing in Helicon seems very limited, and it often crashes for me if I try to use keyboard to undo/redo.

Helicon​	ACDSee​	Photoshop​
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[tunewitsch]

Thanks Mike, for this awesome contribution. My impression is that you have to zoom really deep into the images to note the differences. For my own taste and need (mainly competitions) ACDSee will remain my first choice since it seems to offer the best invested_time/result_quality ratio (select images, hit Ctrl-Alt-S and wait for result) - not to mention that I do not want to spend money for PS or Helicon, my ACDSee subscription fulfills all my needs.