Your opinion? Red Bell Pepper Seeds

[Tina Boes]

Continuing to play with my food, and practice on stacking.
This was a tough photo set up. No matter what I did in Helicon focus, or in PS stacking, I wound up with halos and blurred areas on these seeds. What I wound up doing was choosing a stack that had the first seed all the way in focus, and then another with the second seed all in focus, used Helicon Focus on them separately and saved. I transferred each one to PS and edited out one of the seeds and cleaned up the ghosts and blurred areas around the seed, all using the clone tool. Then I put the final two images into Helicon Focus, and tried all three methods. A & B method wound up with large black spots on the seeds from the editing. Method C combined the images perfectly with no black areas on them.
One final trip to PS to clean up dust spots etc. and crop a little. There was originally a third seed in the background, but the angle of it was highly distracting, so I removed it.
I like the final result.

Nikon D7100, 105mm Nikkor with Raynox 250, ISO 200, F4.5, 1/125 sec., two softbox lights, tripod and remote shutter. Combined image totals are 17.

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[Chavezshutter]

Very nice stack, good job cleaning it up as well, sometimes the cleanup is the biggest part of a stack, so well done. Nice texture and lighting

 

[TMG1961]

Very nice. I am still reading up on focus stacking. Is great for things that don't move but how do you focus stack on a living insect that will not sit perfectly still for longer then 0.5 - 1 second?

 

[Tina Boes]

Very nice. I am still reading up on focus stacking. Is great for things that don't move but how do you focus stack on a living insect that will not sit perfectly still for longer then 0.5 - 1 second?

Thank you! Regarding focus stacking on moving subjects, I don't know of any way to do that personally. Each image is going to be different in alignment and focus/DOF of the different parts of the critter. As you move the point of focusing in small increments, if your subject moves it will throw off any alignment you will need to merge those images cleanly. Even subjects like landscapes need to be relatively still, if it's very windy or the light keeps changing because of clouds, it affects the final result when the images are merged. You would wind up with abstract, which might be interesting depending on the subject matter.
I did some tests with these seeds using natural window lighting from the right and a soft box on the left. The light kept changing through the window because of cloud movement. The result was a nasty lot of ghosting and murky colors because it was not consistent light. It confuses the software.
I do want to experiment with some abstract shots using moving subjects though.

 

[TMG1961]

I am playing around with it a bit. I know how to stack and align the different photos as layers in photoshop and make 1 photo out of it. But need to test out how far i need to change the focuspoint and what focuspoint to use to get the best result for different photos.