Comparing Affinity Photo Focus Merge with HeliconSoft HeliconFocus

hi everyone my name is walter rowe i'm a capture one affiliate today i want to do a brief comparison of affinity photos focus merge tool for stacking focus shift images with the output of helicon soft helicon focus focus stacking tool i'm going to compare the output we'll look very closely around the image at what comes out of the box before any adjustments and then we'll take a brief look at how each tool lets you fine tune the adjustments of what layers have been selected for what parts of the image if you'd like to donate to my channel and keep this content coming i would appreciate it you can go to buy me a coffee.com walter rowe if you need some one-on-one help look at look for the extras section on my buy me a coffee page and request a time for one-on-one assistance i would love to meet you and help you in any way i can let's get to the comparison okay so here we have 30 frames that i've captured with a nikon z7 using the nikon z7 focus shift capability with a focus step size of one this is just a little basket that sits in my house and i've decided it was a good subject because it has lots of variations in depth and color and would be a good test for affinity photos focus merge and helicon soft helicon focus focus stacking so what i've done ahead of time is i've taken these images and processed them into adobe rgb 16-bit tiff files and they are here in this folder in the output folder in capture one and what i'm going to do is send all of these images over to helicon soft one of the nice things about helicon soft is it does give you the ability to directly open them in stacking in the application it's integrated nicely with capture one and you can choose whether or not to keep the intermediate tiff files if you were if you were taking directly from the raw files here i've already got tiff files so i'm just going to go directly in with so here we can see the application has loaded up all the frames and it has not actually rendered anything yet it's showing us all the individual frames and they have different process methods and you can render the output for uh you know different different ways and they have good documentation that describes what these different methods are now let's go to affinity photo notice that i've had to go directly to affinity photo and create a new focus merge document this is different than how it works with helicon focus helicon focus is more directly integrated with capture one the focus merged capabilities in affinity photo require you to create a new focus merge document and then select your source files but once you do so you can see that it loads them right in into this new focus merge a little palette here that shows you all the source documents that you're going to combine when i press ok it's actually going to start rendering now while i let that render i'm going to go back to capture one and i'm going to show you two documents that i have over here for that i've already processed let me close that little window there these were processed earlier and i'm going to hide the toolbar so we can pan around the image and look very closely at them so let's go right in really close we'll get up to this is actually 200 percent and so we can pan right around we can see on the left hand side is the affinity photo image and you can see there's a little halo around here where it selected the wrong layer for that section but that's kind of in a blurred out area all the areas where i think there actually should be really crisp edges it's done a really good job in finding those edges and finding the sharpest bits and helicon soft helicon focus has done a very good job as well you can see on the right hand side is the same section of the image in helicon focus you can see they both have really fine detail let me go to 100 and we'll so would be truly pixel pixel level and you can see that they've both done a very very good job of selecting the proper areas for correction and stacking up for finding you know the sharpest bits they both do a really really good job um what what that tells me is the 60 retail affinity photo is very very capable and kind of on par with the 200 helicon focus software what you do get with the helicon focus is the better integration with capture one so if you're a capture one user and especially if you do this a lot you may choose to use the helicon focus just for its more direct integration so you can see this does a really good job i mean everything has been selected quite well it and it's got everything nicely focused so just wanted you to see this up close and personal so let's go back to uh 100 view review the toolbar let's go back into affinity photo so affinity photo is still rendering the image here we'll wait for this to render and while that renders we can go into helicon soft i'm going to use the depth map where it works best on choosing things with fine detail according to the documentation i read and notice that they give you the ability to adjust the radius and the smoothing the radius is the kind of the surrounding area that it uses to choose what is most sharply focused and i've played with this particular sequence a few times and found that you know smaller radius when you have fine detail works a little bit better in terms of edge detection and looking beyond and and really getting those those perfect details smoothing is how it actually blends the layers together it's kind of that softness of the mask edges and so since this has a lot of little detail i want the smoothing to be rather small rather versus rather large so i'm going to go ahead and tell it to render and one thing i do like is this application is also pretty fast it actually is faster than affinity photo in doing the job but also costs three times the price and actually affinity photo is often on sale for thirty dollars so you really have uh six times the price almost seven times the price to get the helicon focus but if you're doing this professionally two hundred dollars for helicon focus is nothing that's a one-time lifetime fee you can pay and have the helicon focus uh persistent license forever uh so if you do this a lot and especially if you do it professionally then it's it's a no-brainer is easy investment and for the ease of integration i think it's a really good really good deal i'm going to hit command 1 which zooms into 100 percent and notice that helicon focus automatically gives you the side by side comparison what it's showing you on the left is the frame that's selected on the right hand side panel so it gives you an idea of you know what areas are in focus for that particular selected frame if you notice as i mouse over the right hand side which is the merged image wherever the mouse is pointing it's telling me which frame was used for that it's selected for that particular area you can see right here is a little softness and my guess is because there's quite a bit of distance between this edge and the subject behind it that as the subject behind it got more in focus this area got less in focus and as as things blur that's a grow in size so if i go and put my mouse here and use f9 as as shown on the screen it will automatically select on the left hand side the frame that was used for that and you can see that there's now this kind of blurred edge in front that makes up this section uh so can i actually uh use that i probably can and if i go into the retouching tool uh i can go over here let me go back and hit the f9 again when you switch tools it actually switches the image selected again so let's and we can use the square brackets to adjust the size of the brush then we can just paint this back in so now we can kind of paint some of that back in so this gives you an idea of how you can do fixes for what's in focus and what's not using the helicon focus software and again i'm just using my mouse wheel to scroll through the image here this looks like there's some out of focus area i can go to f9 and select a proper frame for that area and notice on the left hand side that that the basket handle is kind of blurred and grows in size and that's probably what's causing this kind of smearing that's through here but i can try and paint back in some so you can see that i'm getting a bit of that back in but it does show you that there were some areas that weren't perfect and uh and so i'm just now selecting them and pinning them back in they make it pretty easy i have to say it's a very intuitive interface it's really nice and it does a pretty good job let me go back and just paint all back in here where this is there we go just paint that right back in so this is how we can do corrections in helicon focus for selecting a different frame or different layer in the stacked image for the corrections for for what it uses for being sharp so that's how we work with helicon focus now let's go look at what we have with affinity photo so affinity photo is now rendered our uh image i'm going to go to 100 infinity photo and we're going to pan around and let's look at the same area in affinity photo now affinity photo you'll see right here where we had that smearing under the basket handle it's actually done a little better job right out of the box getting the correct layer for what is sharp and i have to say i'm really impressed by that there's no adjustments in terms of choosing which algorithm if i go back to helicon focus and we go to the rendering tool you can change which method it uses to render the different frames into a merged frame and you can adjust the radius and smoothing that is really nice and tweaking those values can make a difference you don't have that ability to tweak those and fine-tune those in affinity photo but it does a really good job of finding some of the stuff what i do miss in affinity photo is the ability to automatically select which layer was used for a particular area if i select if i select something it doesn't automatically go to the layer that was used to um to create that i have to actually hit this little eyeball which now takes me frame by frame and i can now go through and choose which layers are the right ones for that area now that i've got that selected i deselect the eyeball and notice that the clone brush is automatically selected so what we're effectively doing is cloning in this area from the selected layer into the finished image so we're just going to paint that so this kind of gets rid of that halo that we saw in the background and so that takes care of that very nice so that now we now we've kind of fixed that little area and let's see about this other area right here looks a little bit sketchy but what we see is the basket has actually grown in size because of its blurry and that part that kind of hides what would be sharp in that area and even if i move forward in the frame i can't really get around that so this is actually an artifact of focus stacking and has nothing to do with the tool itself and its ability to render sharp areas or pick the sharp areas this is just the fact that this section is very close to us and this further section is very far away the distance between the two sections and so far and the uh aperture that i used creates so much blur that it grows in the the for the front object grows in size so this is this just gives you a sample of how you can compare or how you can fix uh the areas that might not be focused properly but i'm just panning around the image here and you can see that right out of the box the the work that affinity photo did for focus merging is spot on it it actually did in my opinion right out of the box a better job in choosing the right frames for the uh for the um what's supposed to be sharp here i just want to paint this in just kind of get rid of the little halo so we can just kind of paint around where areas where we just have these little halos and we can hide them yep that one looks good so i just want to paint now back over here so i'm just what i'm doing is getting rid of these little halos but you can see it's not very hard to do it's actually quite easy and so i can just paint right in and you know it all it all kind of cleans up quite quite quickly so that's the that's the method you can use for doing repairs in affinity photo you can see how you can do repairs in the tool for helicon focus and obviously the the product of both of them is exceptional and honestly uh really indistinguishable in my opinion uh in the in the final product and i think it's actually if you were doing this as a hobby i would say affinity photo all the way no question it's a very stellar tool it does have the ability to fix areas that don't match up in terms of what it picked for focus merge and the output is tremendous really tremendous and if you do this professionally and you need that speed and integration and you want the ability to use the f9 key to automatically select the right layer then the helicon focus is the better choice and if you're doing it professionally the 200 license fee is a drop in the bucket compared to all the things we spend money on as professionals thanks for watching hope this has been helpful for you look forward to seeing you next time

Channel: Walter Rowe Photography

Views: 934

Keywords: Capture One, Photography, How-To, Raw Editor, Tutorial, Post Processing, Digital Asset Management, Capture One Sessions, Capture One Catalogs, Live Stream

Id: opHYizdUGuU

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021