Playing around in the snow

This last week has been an interesting one.

First I had my third eye operation in the space of a year. Then we had a foot on snow.

However, the recovery period and the snow gave me a chance to try out a few specialist image making techniques.

So I decided to use my IR converted 50D with my 14mm Rokinon, capture three images at 1.6, 2.6 and 8 ft (as computed by the FocusStacker App), and process the resultant focus brackets using Helicon Focus and finally ‘colour correct’ and adjust with Photoshop in LAB space.

Well I can report the experiment was a great success. The (boring) test image is sharp from a foot to infinity and the workflow above went well. For example, Helicon Focus is integrated into Lightroom.

I was most impressed with Helicon Focus, as I needed to address some branch tip (wind induced) movements. In HF all I needed to do was simply paint away the ghosts. But note I didn't do them all :-)

Bottom line: once you have a workflow and the right tools, creating, what at first seems to be a complex image, is really quite simple.