How to Use Helicon Focus Basics

hi this is Janice Sullivan from Sullivan J photography today I'm going to talk to you about processing your stacked images using the Helicon focus so what is a stacked image let me show you I'm actually on my website here let's scroll down and show you this image when you photograph up close you'll lose depth of field which means they'll be less and focus in your camera you can use an f-stop that's high but truthfully Helicon focus is so cool to use and easy to use that it's better for you to go ahead and stack your images and what I mean is when you take the picture you're going to focus on an area and make sure that it is in focus and then you're gonna slowly keep taking pictures overlapping everything that is sharp and your camera and then once you have what you want you can merge them all together into one photograph so everything that you wanted in focus is sharp and eye drawing to the viewer for example, this image I couldn't get all of this leaf in focus and the leaf down here in focus so I had to stack my photographs take a picture take a picture take a picture take a picture take a picture and take a picture and then merge all of the photographs so everything is in focus once you get that down you can even have fun like I did on this image up here now in this image I focused only on the stem and up close you really could see that this is all in focus but it was too distracting to have the pedals in focus so I made sure that those were actually out of focus and I'll show you how to do that in Helicon focus let's go ahead and start the way I process my images and then of course I'll give you other tips along the way in case you want to do things differently I process my photographs here in Lightroom you can take your image files and load them into Helicon focus for me I like to actually play a little bit with the photograph because you have more power here with the raw image what I like to do is always categorize my stacked photographs because it becomes a blur and as you can see here to the left it has 156 photographs just in this file so it's just easy for me to just throw them in red that's how I end up putting my categories is that they're red and then when I'm actually working on them I'll give them a couple stars so they're all the same pulls up into my library and everything is highlighted at the bottom left you can see and then I'll go straight into the development module click up there now at the bottom left you can see this guy is the one that's actually being worked on it's it's the brightest of them all and I'll usually start through the camera calibration because you can really change up a lot of your colors here it's RGB and that is every color in the spectrum that we can see so you really can play with this area I'm going to actually go to neutral we're gonna do this quickly because it's a video tutorial we want to get through it fast so I'm just going to show you really quick I'll go to lens Corrections play with that I'll do some basics I might even go into here a little bit but we'll go ahead I know this looks kind of cool in tungsten and if I do in Auto I think it gets too bright yes it is a little bright so it'll bring down the exposure just a little bit then once I'm done with all of the goodies that I've played with in the development area I will go to the bottom right here and I will sync up these bottom photographs with the image that I was just playing with I'll go ahead and synchronize that right now and the next thing is to go into Helicon focus and that's super easy everything's highlighted you just do a right-click go to export and then up to here look on focus and click on that and while that's going through I'll give you a couple tips make sure all your exposures are the same the program can't handle if one section is super bright and the same section is dark it will give you a hard time so make sure exposures is correct and all of your changes are all similar and when you're photographing manually change your focus you can do that either with your lens or you can use a focus rack and I'll give you a link to that also because when I do these tutorials I always like to give you all the goodies that you can use to enjoy your experience see how this is paused right here that's just saying that you're still working on this image because it has open Helicon we will go to that right now and once you're done with all the changes and you push apply it brings back the information into Lightroom so you have that TIFF file that you've just completed let's get on to the next video so you can learn the interface of Helicon focus this is where I'm going to show you all the different areas to play with to make your images really pop in the first video tutorial I discussed preparing your images for gila con focus now we're going to discuss the interface of the software so let to it this is the interface of gila con focus and with anything new you really should take the time and get acclimated in the various areas of the software it just helps you become a better photographer this way you understand the different things that the software can do for you and that's what this short tutorial is about we're gonna go over a couple things that are basic this way when we get into the last video and we're processing you're not gonna save yourself where was that where does she go I don't understand take the time and pay attention to everything that I'm showing you and it will help you figure out what you need to do in your various circumstances up at the top left is your menu you can get into your preferences here and do some adjustments in this area you can actually load files here open images like I said there are several ways you can open your images in HeLa con focus this is one of them and if I want to start a new stack because anytime you open images it will remove all of the images that you brought in originally so if I pick these photographs here and then did a shift and then went to open it we'll go ahead and add them to HeLa con but it will remove the source images that I just sent over from Lightroom so we'll just cancel out of that for now I like these over here the toolbar is just easy access again you can open images this way and we'll use these two when we actually render which means that we're going to merge all the photographs together this right here with the little camera is called HeLa con remote and let me just show this to you briefly HeLa con remote is a tool that's an extra so you would have to pay for this but what's nice about it is if you want to do time-lapse you can do this you connect your computer to your camera it's kind of like tethering in Lightroom where you connect your computer and your camera and you can visually see what you're photographing what's nice about this is that you can actually take a photograph of the foreground the very front and then take a photograph towards the very back which is in focus it will take all of the rest of the images that are needed to have a complete InFocus photograph just to let you know that this program here has a really hard time with moving subjects so really if you're going to do this it should really be in a studio environment all right let's get out of this so you we can get back into the Gila con focus the render button up at the top here on the left the green render button is here also and that basically means when you push this button it will take all of the source images to the right and combine them and we will do that in the next video again here at the top there is a rendering button the retouching button there's a texan scale you can actually add text to your images and the saving button over here to the right is the source images that we want to use to combine to make one focused image then we get down here to the bottom very little small area in here and I think this is important if you click on this little dial here you can open your images here remove images and/or remove all of your images there's a lot of goodies in here that you can play with so that's there for you if needed we'll get into the radius and smoothing when we actually process a photograph same with the outputs here we'll talk a little bit about that when we're processing the images down below is super important this is where you really need to pay attention to getting up close if I want to go one two one I click on this bottom area right here and boom you're automatically one two one I push my spacebar it gives me the little hand guy here and you can move the image around to see what you want to see and you really do need to get up close because you'll be surprised especially if you have a lot of images stacking you'll need to see what's going on and what's in focus if you want to get closer you just pretty much can move this guy or you can push the plus sign if you like we're at 200% now if you want to get back to view everything just go ahead and click on this guy right here at the bottom so these are really cool tools to see oh I want to show you this too I kind of feel that he Lacan really needs to improve on this truthfully because this kind of is just so small for me but this little thing right here is the magnifying glass and that's kind of showing us where we're at if you want to view the various areas you could just hold this down and move it around now let's get on to the fun part where we're actually processing the image and I'm going to show you some retouching and some fun goodies while you're actually in he look on focus to make your images the way you want them to be now we're getting into the fun stuff so let's get started so what do I mean about the fun stuff the fun stuff is merging all of your photographs together to see what it looks like after you have rendered it it's so cool to see the outputs of what this software does for you on the right you can see that I have all my source images checked if for some reason you don't want a certain image to be part of the rendering you can just uncheck it what is important is the rendering methods there are three methods in this program that are important and what I'm going to do now is I have made sure that all of the images checked and I'll start rendering these methods and talk about the information why they're rendering and then we'll take a good look at all three of them method a is checked I'll leave the radius and smoothing at its defaults and we will about that in a little bit and I'll push this render button what method a does is it works on the contrast of the subject so it takes the different contrast and calculates that to sharpen your image method B will click on that now and I will leave the radius and smoothing the same here also method B basically works with your images when you have consecutively shot in order say from the front to the back or from the back to the front this is a great program to use when you have taken the time to consecutively shoot your images a and B both have the radius and the smoothing slider radius is important because it brings out those fine details of your image so if you have fine hair or really detailed information make sure your radius is low actually the software suggests three to five if you want to change the radius you can use this here by moving the slider or you can actually use the arrow keys down in here and change the radius that way again the radius is really important for those fine details but what happens is you'll get more halos and noise problems when you use the lower number so if you start getting that then bring your radius up to a higher number by bringing your smoothing down that also produces sharper images and you can adjust them here or here each time you make an adjustment here you have to render it again if you've noticed the first one is telling me that I used A method A and this is my radius and this is my smoothing and this is what I really like about the output is that you can do a variety of calculations and then just go back and forth to see which is the best for you the last method is the pyramid this method is good for complex images if you have say a hundred stacks of images that you want to merge together definitely use the pyramid but you do have to be careful with your contrast and glare in the image so you may have to change your contrast stay in Lightroom or another program that you use if you feel like it's just overdoing the contrast of your output image after you played with all of your outputs in the various ways that you can make your image sharper I suggest that you actually view them up close a good start is just to evaluate each image that you have sent to the output folder down here below we'll go into the retouching real quick because if you do have problems this is where you can fix it or if you want to do an artistic approach to your image you can play with it there click up at the top in the retouching area once you're in the retouching area you can use these tools up here in the top right we're in this brush right here these are the two brushes that I use the brush that we're in now and the eraser these source images let's get up close so you can kind of see what I'm talking about these source images each have different areas that are in focus and as you click on them you can see the variety of focused areas I'm noticing down here at the bottom that it didn't do a very good job cleaning this up so I'm gonna go ahead and paint to make sure that all of my water drops are in focus remember in the beginning I told you you can be artistic if you'd like to use an area that's actually at a focus just for your own creative perspective pick something that you want to play with and then you could paint that in your output image below if you decide that this isn't a good feel for you you can go to the top right and click on the eraser brush and then just paint that out and basically once you get everything fixed the way you would like this output to look like then you go ahead and get into the saving area up here at the top once you've gone through all of the images and you're happy with everything all you have to do next is go to this saving tab click on that click on the saving area here title your new image and click save and it will add a new TIFF file to the files that you were working on and Lightroom will have all that information for you so you can go on and play with the photograph even more let's go ahead and now look at the completed image

Channel: Sullivan J Photography

Views: 25,051

Keywords: how to use helicon focus, helicon focus render methods, helicon focus basics, helicon, heliconsoft, stacking, stack, Macro Photography Tips, Photography Tutorials and Tips, focus stacking, Landscape photography, Janice Sullivan, sullivan j photography, one of the top 20 macro sites to follow, how to photography closeup, image stacking, depth of field, macro, focus, macro photography, photography, tutorial, software, dof, Photo stacking

Id: uadc33zhLlY

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019