Helicon Focus vs CS4 layers feature

[stewarthemley]

I concede that I haven't mastered the CS4 autoblend/align layers feature yet but after viewing the tutorial on Adobe's site I ran what I thought was a straightforward set of six images through, as per instructions, and got a terrible mess. Blurred areas all over the image. Did the same with Helicon Focus, which I am familiar with, and got a near perfect result. I can't show the pics as its for a client who has specified internal use only, but its a simple blend in an office starting at a window and ending about 2 metres away at a desk. There are some strong highlights but nothing abnormal.

I hope I'm doing something wrong, missing something that will transform the results, but in the meantime any comment would be most welcome.

[Tim Gray]

I concede that I haven't mastered the CS4 autoblend/align layers feature yet but after viewing the tutorial on Adobe's site I ran what I thought was a straightforward set of six images through, as per instructions, and got a terrible mess. Blurred areas all over the image. Did the same with Helicon Focus, which I am familiar with, and got a near perfect result. I can't show the pics as its for a client who has specified internal use only, but its a simple blend in an office starting at a window and ending about 2 metres away at a desk. There are some strong highlights but nothing abnormal.

I hope I'm doing something wrong, missing something that will transform the results, but in the meantime any comment would be most welcome.

Same experience here, not necessarily a mess throughout the image, but enough quality issues that I'm not tempted to try again.  The Helicon folks don't need to worry.  

It reminds me a bit of the HDR, PS is a poor second to other third party products out there. I suspect that one way Adobe decides new features is to watch and see what the third party folks are doing, but when they add the function, it seems like, even after a few releases, it still lags behind the thrid party apps.  Noise, sharpening and HDR in PS are still not on a par with the third party apps.

If I'm right, I'd expect to see CS5 have something like the Topaz adjustments.

[Schewe]

I hope I'm doing something wrong, missing something that will transform the results, but in the meantime any comment would be most welcome.

If you want help, outlining the EXACT steps you took would be useful. You did align the layers before you did the focus stack, right?

[stewarthemley]

If you want help, outlining the EXACT steps you took would be useful. You did align the layers before you did the focus stack, right?

First, thanks Jeff for replying. It's great to have your massive personal knowledge base at my disposal! And sorry for not defining my problem more clearly. I don't even think I made it clear that I am after increasing depth of field by combining several images. (I know most people will realise that, but I still should have made it clearer.)

So, what I did, following the Adobe video, was: (having loaded all six images as layers via Bridge) select all layers, auto blend selecting stack images & seamless tones & colors, then turn on all layers. I also tried auto aligning the layers without auto blending, and auto aligning and then auto blending but couldn't see much difference. There were many small blurred areas which Helicon didn't produce.

As soon as I get more time I'll start poking around drop down menus, triangles, anything that might be hiding the secret key. Usual process with a complex new program.  But anything that can shorten that process will be gratefully received!

[Lust4Life]

Tim,

What 3rd party HDR tool have you found to be the best?

Jack

Same experience here, not necessarily a mess throughout the image, but enough quality issues that I'm not tempted to try again.  The Helicon folks don't need to worry.  

It reminds me a bit of the HDR, PS is a poor second to other third party products out there. I suspect that one way Adobe decides new features is to watch and see what the third party folks are doing, but when they add the function, it seems like, even after a few releases, it still lags behind the thrid party apps.  Noise, sharpening and HDR in PS are still not on a par with the third party apps.

If I'm right, I'd expect to see CS5 have something like the Topaz adjustments.

[Tim Gray]

Tim,

What 3rd party HDR tool have you found to be the best?

Jack

Depends on what I'm after - sometimes I do want the cartoonish effect from Photomatix, but if I want a more natural look, I'm becoming fonder of Enfuse (only used it for a couple of sessions).  The plus for Enfuse, in addition to the more natural look is that it's batch processing through Lightroom is more flexibile than Photomatix.  Just group the brackets into stacks and select the stacks and run the plug in - the key is that you don't need the same number of brackets in each stack.  With Photomatix, you can batch, but only if there are the same number of images in each bracket.  The downside of enfuse is that it takes a while.  Last weekend I did a series of about 30, and it was an overnight experience.

[BernardLanguillier]

I suspect that one way Adobe decides new features is to watch and see what the third party folks are doing, but when they add the function, it seems like, even after a few releases, it still lags behind the thrid party apps.  Noise, sharpening and HDR in PS are still not on a par with the third party apps.

I still don't get why they even try to compete with the small guys in various niches like stitching, noise reduction, now DoF stacking. For me it looks like a wasteful use of resources at Adobe.

I can very well imagine how it happens. Some bright engineer has an idea "hey, we could do DoF stacking using the align layers capability". Then John, or whoever has a go on define, ends up saying "yes, do it". They guy starts by doing it as a side job overtime, but then they find some issues and have to allocate real resources to finish the job. Since they are under-staffed, as all software developpers are, they end up giving up half way through an release something that works only so so...

I don't mean to be harsh, but personnally, I'd rather have them release quicker the 64 bits support on OSX rather than all these half cooked functions that no serious users will use anyway.

Photoshop should be seen as an image manipulation platform, like an OS. It should focus on stability, speed, capacity and core image manipulations.

Cheers,
Bernard

[ejmartin]

I still don't get why they even try to compete with the small guys in various niches like stitching, noise reduction, now DoF stacking. For me it looks like a wasteful use of resources at Adobe.

I don't mean to be harsh, but personnally, I'd rather have them release quicker the 64 bits support on OSX rather than all these half cooked functions that no serious users will use anyway.

Photoshop should be seen as an image manipulation platform, like an OS. It should focus on stability, speed, capacity and core image manipulations.

Cheers,
Bernard

Adobe seems to have a corporate strategy much the same as Microsoft -- Embrace, extend, and extinguish.  Hence the bloat in PS that parallels the bloat in the MS Office suite, and the Windows OS.

[BernardLanguillier]

Adobe seems to have a corporate strategy much the same as Microsoft -- Embrace, extend, and extinguish.  Hence the bloat in PS that parallels the bloat in the MS Office suite, and the Windows OS.

I can understand Adobe's desire to control the raw conversion for instance, that could be a Trojan horse potentially threatening PS. The very release of LR is proof enough that they saw this as a real danger. I could compare this to IE's release by MS.

But for the niches listed above, what are the odds that PTgui becomes a PS threat??? Besides Adobe has not been able to come even close to the performance of dedicated tools.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Graham Mitchell]

I tried CS4 once on a test stack and it worked well, but it was a low res stack, not a serious test.

Helicon Focus offers several parameters which you can change to control the result, so I'm not surprised if some people are still getting better results with that. I'll try a real high-res test and report back.

[Pantoned]

I tried it the other day and got perfect results on the first try. I don't know if that makes a difference but I did put the layers in order of focus (front to back), I mean not mixing them. This is a great improvement for me and I'm sure for a lot of photographers, a great save of time. I did tried a demo of Helicon some time ago and couldn't make it align, since then I've been using cs3 align + manual masking.

Arnau

I concede that I haven't mastered the CS4 autoblend/align layers feature yet but after viewing the tutorial on Adobe's site I ran what I thought was a straightforward set of six images through, as per instructions, and got a terrible mess. Blurred areas all over the image. Did the same with Helicon Focus, which I am familiar with, and got a near perfect result. I can't show the pics as its for a client who has specified internal use only, but its a simple blend in an office starting at a window and ending about 2 metres away at a desk. There are some strong highlights but nothing abnormal.

I hope I'm doing something wrong, missing something that will transform the results, but in the meantime any comment would be most welcome.

[BernardLanguillier]

I tried it the other day and got perfect results on the first try. I don't know if that makes a difference but I did put the layers in order of focus (front to back), I mean not mixing them. This is a great improvement for me and I'm sure for a lot of photographers, a great save of time. I did tried a demo of Helicon some time ago and couldn't make it align, since then I've been using cs3 align + manual masking.

The align capability of both software (Helicon and CS3) can have issues if some objects moved between the frames. Helion Focus is still improving and I have gotten excellent results recently.



Cheers,
Bernard