Focus Stacking--how much image preparation?

[mdijb]

How much image processing do people do before using Photoshop or other program to create a stack?

ANy sharpening, noise reduction, processing within LR, Etc??

Or is is it best to just send the raw files with no processing at all??

MDIJB

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

How much image processing do people do before using Photoshop or other program to create a stack?

ANy sharpening, noise reduction, processing within LR, Etc??

Or is is it best to just send the raw files with no processing at all??

Hi,

Chromatic aberration , dust removal(!), and highlight recovery. Those are very much needed corrections, before stacking. Correcting for vignetting won't hurt either.

Capture sharpening, if you know what to do, and if the slices are correctly spaced, can help to maintain better resolution throughout the image resampling that will take place to compensate for magnification differences and slice registration.

Capture sharpening may also add a bit of noise, so reducing that should not hurt, unless it affects the in-focus regions by reducing micro-detail contrast. When the slices are narrow, noise reduction may not matter much but that also depends on stacking method/algorithm. So that's depending on the particular situation and software used. I usually don't reduce noise anyway, because I'm a low ISO shooter, if feasible.

Cheers,
Bart

[Hening Bettermann]

I think I noticed that Helicon Focus has trouble "seeing" in the dark areas. To "help" the app, I tried to apply a gamma of 2, and revert it after the stacking. Here I made the strange experience, that "reverting" to a visual like-before, the gamma needed was not 1:2=0.5, but rather something like 0.6.