14 DAY TRIAL // While for general photography, the computer is an important tool for both touching up photos and making compositions, when it comes to great macro photography there isn't much that can help beyond an insanely expensive camera and lens. Granted, even macro photos can use some Photoshop time to make them even better, but that is pretty much it. Or? isn't it?
Several highly specialized macro photography programs, such as Helicon Focus can help you leverage your computing power to get more out of your macros.
What it does Helicon Focus is a very specialized program that takes several partially focused images and creates a new completely focused one from them. It is ideal both for macro photography and for optical microscope image processing where shallow depth of field can be a real problem.
Working with it Working with is deceptively simple considering the end results. Simply open up all of the images and hit the run button. The program will do all the processing and then show the end result. Simple.
Of course, there is a bit more to it than that, and by tweaking the setting you can get different results, but that is to be expected. However, it is worth mentioning that there is only so much the settings can do, and ultimately it all depends on the images themselves. Making adjustments to the ways the images are processed is quite easy as Radius and Smoothing, the two options that determine the end result are shown next to the result, making it easy to experiment with them and then compare how each affects the result. If the result has many pronounced edge artifacts, then you need to properly order the images. For proper results, you need to have the images where the focus is furthest away first, and the ones where the focus is closest at the end. Furthermore, the images need to follow in the right order. Unfortunately the source list is very poorly made and there is no way to manually reorder the source images from within the program. To make things even worse, they will automatically be reordered ascending based on name. The best approach is to reorder and rename the images before loading them into the application.
The program is quite fast in both processing and displaying the images, and can handle large amounts of photos both as input and as output.
Shake it? Having images taken from a still camera with no shake and overlapping areas of focus will give out perfect results, as can be seen from the sample images included with the program.
While the developers boast that it will compensate for changes in size and position from shot to shot, from the tests I ran using the flower images seen on the developer's website, the end result is not as perfect, with faint fuzz surrounding the flower. While not perfect, the results are none the less quite remarkable, and with a little touching up the end results can be astounding. Also, the original quality and size of the images seems to play a very important part. Bigger images seem to be handled better than smaller ones, and will deliver a crisper result.
Advanced options There are two options in Helicon Focus that can be considered advanced.
The first is the capability to process a dust map that will remove the black points from the images caused by dust on the sensor or dust in the optical system of the microscope. Not only is this quite handy, but it is also very easy to use. Simply take a blank, white photo of the same size as the ones you want to process and then let the program analyze it, and determine where the dust specs are.
The second option is a bit more complicated. Sometimes, when the program combines images, it can have a hard time deciding how to blend them, because of the way it looks after sharp features and fuzzy textures, and the results can be semi transparent. To get rid of such artifacts, the program lets you add opacity masks to the images that are to be processed so that you can tell it what should be visible and what not. These are simply alpha masks and can be edited with any application of your preference. From here on it is simply a matter of choosing the image that is the best source for the area in question and change its opacity map so that it is all white in that area. This gives it precedence over other images when it comes to that area in the end result.
The Good
Great results with minimal effort, very easy to tweak the setting and then choose from several results and fast processing.
The Bad
The source list is a nightmare. Why on earth you can't manually reorder the images is beyond me.
The Truth
If you are into macros give this program a look over, it is fast and easy to use, it gives great results and is quite reasonably priced.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
