New Fuji X100VI announced

[MDM]

On 04/03/2024 at 00:34, wiskerke said:

And may you stay forever young!

 

Thank you for reminding me of Helicon. It's ages ago since I've used it. And Zerene and PTGui among others. Somewhere in between all those was one that allowed aligning layers by hand with *pins* you stuck through the most important points. I have never found it again.

Helicon does not support lens corrections in RAW afaik. Which for my use case is an absolute must have. Now you could go around that by saving DNGs first and feeding those to Helicon of course.

Anyway, it's early days and I am still waiting for a thinner adapter to arrive to connect my new Makro Symmar to a body. The one I have is about 0.3mm to thick. Yes I know how to shave that off. However it belongs to some other setup so I needed wanted a second one anyway.

My primary and real use case involves RX100 images btw and those are worthless without the baked-in lens profile, which may very well be specific for the individual lens.

No lens profile for the Symmar, and I expect it to be one of the few that can do without.

The Symmar will occasionally be used for focus stacking and maybe copying some old color negative film. The RX100 images are huge stacks (100+) of high ISO hand held shots that need to become high resolution and noise free single images. And some may even some day end up on Alamy.

 

wim

 

Thank you wim. And the same to you. 

 

I export raw files from Lightroom using the Helicon  plugin and I generally leave the files alone completely until they arrive back in Lightroom. I never do anything to them in Helicon - I just render and save as DNG. Helicon requires downloading of the DNG converter rather than using Lightroom/ACR. I've experimented with the three main render settings and just let it do its thing.

 

I have never been too concerned about the lens profiles but I'll check it out after reading this. I no longer have an RX100VA - I sold it a few months back as it was getting zero use but I expect it should be the same for the baked-in lens profiles in a lot of the Nikon Z lenses.  I wonder if it is possible to add a similar profile back to the DNG file if the original is stripped in exporting to Helicon. Adobe used to have and presumably still have that lens profile creator so maybe you could create your own.  

 

Of course I am talking Lightroom and I think you are an ACR guy which doesn't appear to have the same facility as the LR plugin. I don't know if there is any difference just opening raw files into Helicon as against exporting them from Lightroom.

 

Anyway happy stacking. 

 

 

Edited March 5 by MDM

[DDoug]

On 04/03/2024 at 11:16, MDM said:

 

Fair enough. If it works for you then that's fine. I would suggest experimenting with the camera on a tripod, stabilisation off, different apertures, as well as the interval and number of shots but I don't know how that works on your camera. If you use manual focusing, you lose the benefit of the fixed step sizes  in AF (presuming that is how it works). If wim can get 100+ stacks on the little Sony RX100 handheld, then it must be possible but he has not said what subject matter he is shooting - small or large scale.

 

I am not an expert in focus bracketing (in the Nikon world it is called Focus Shift) but I've experimented enough to have a reasonable idea of how it works. I have never considered doing it handheld at all and would not do so for subjects where the longitudinal movement (towards and back from the subject) of the camera could be similar to or greater than the size of the step interval. I might consider it for larger scale features such as landscapes but I've never tried that yet. It is really a matter of trial and error. 

I’m no stranger to tripods. However, I wanted to test Ichikawa’s claim that their software could align hand-held images well enough to do focus stacking. The set below was shot hand-held with a telephoto zoom set at 70mm. I haven’t sent it through QC yet, so the jury’s still out on whether it would pass.

 

[MDM]

26 minutes ago, DDoug said:

I’m no stranger to tripods. However, I wanted to test Ichikawa’s claim that their software could align hand-held images well enough to do focus stacking. The set below was shot hand-held with a telephoto zoom set at 70mm. I haven’t sent it through QC yet, so the jury’s still out on whether it would pass.

 

 

It's not clear what we are seeing here (what is being compared to what?) and the image is way to small to make sensible judgement. The picture on the left is way out of focus even at the very low resolution posted here - one for the bin. It's impossiuble to judge the image of the right at that size tiny size although it does not look sharp to me on my laptop screen which tends to exaggerate sharpenss. Can you post a full size image instead and explain how it was taken? 

[DDoug]

9 minutes ago, MDM said:

 

It's not clear what we are seeing here (what is being compared to what?) and the image is way to small to make sensible judgement. The picture on the left is way out of focus even at the very low resolution posted here - one for the bin. It's impossiuble to judge the image of the right at that size tiny size although it does not look sharp to me on my laptop screen which tends to exaggerate sharpenss. Can you post a full size image instead and explain how it was taken? 

The picture on the left is one of the seven shots on the top that went into making the composed image.

The picture on the right is the composed image. If QC bounces it, I'll concede the point.

[MDM]

If I was the jury I would have to ask for the evidence to be presented in a way that I could actually judge it properly - in other words a full size image. As it is I can't say either way as the image is too small. I would suggest posting at a large size so I and others can have a look before you submit. You would need to submit it on its own or you would learn nothing if the submission passes in any case. 

Edited March 5 by MDM

[DDoug]

Yes, I’m aware of that. Of the two QC failures I’ve had, one was a scanned 35mm slide in the first set of images in 2014 and the other was from a recent wholesale upload of images that I previously had online here. Apparently it passed before simply because they overlooked it. I’ll submit this one by itself. Hopefully it’s acceptable because there are lots of possible macro subjects I see while walking, and although my younger self was happy to lug around a tripod I’m less and less so as time passes.

 

I was out a little while ago to see if there was any new bud blast that should be removed from the Rhododendrons. There’s a bit of a breeze and thus movement in the plant. So it seems that even with a tripod, there times when the software’s ability to align images would be valuable.

[MDM]

Best of luck then. Let's know how you get on. 

 

I would only use focus stacking on plants in perfectly still conditions. 

[DDoug]

2 hours ago, MDM said:

Best of luck then. Let's know how you get on. 

 

I would only use focus stacking on plants in perfectly still conditions. 

The main thing I wanted to illustrate with this is that Silkypix did a superb job of aligning the images, even though they were hand-held. As to whether this particular image is the one to test with QC, I'm not sure. Even using a tripod, some alignment could be necessary. I might try again with my adapted Micro-Nikkor AIS 55mm and a focusing rail.

[M.Chapman]

1 hour ago, DDoug said:

The main thing I wanted to illustrate with this is that Silkypix did a superb job of aligning the images, even though they were hand-held. As to whether this particular image is the one to test with QC, I'm not sure. Even using a tripod, some alignment could be necessary. I might try again with my adapted Micro-Nikkor AIS 55mm and a focusing rail.

The technology to align a short burst of images is also used very successfully by the "handheld twilight" mode on some cameras, for example the Sony RX100. It can eliminate camera shake very effectively, but elements moving independently within the frame remain blurred.

 

Mark

[MDM]

4 hours ago, DDoug said:

The main thing I wanted to illustrate with this is that Silkypix did a superb job of aligning the images, even though they were hand-held. As to whether this particular image is the one to test with QC, I'm not sure. Even using a tripod, some alignment could be necessary. I might try again with my adapted Micro-Nikkor AIS 55mm and a focusing rail.

 

Weil I just tried auto focus bracketing photographing a banana using some LED lights as light source.  I tried it handheld and managed to get a reasonable stack and decent DNG composite from Helicon Focus but I had to shoot at  ISO 4000 to get a shutter speed high enough to avoid camera shake even with stabilisation on. Using  a tripod, I shot at  ISO 64 and a shutter speed around 1/2 second so I got a much cleaner composite image out of Helicon Focus. So yes I'm convinced - it is possible handheld but more difficult and much poorer quality in this case because of the low light. It would be much better in daylight of course. I think the big issue is stillness if shooting vegetation outdoors, tripod or not. I would still use a tripod when possible though. 

 

The Micro-Nikkor 55 is one of my all time favourite lenses

[DDoug]

11 hours ago, MDM said:

 

Weil I just tried auto focus bracketing photographing a banana using some LED lights as light source.  I tried it handheld and managed to get a reasonable stack and decent DNG composite from Helicon Focus but I had to shoot at  ISO 4000 to get a shutter speed high enough to avoid camera shake even with stabilisation on. Using  a tripod, I shot at  ISO 64 and a shutter speed around 1/2 second so I got a much cleaner composite image out of Helicon Focus. So yes I'm convinced - it is possible handheld but more difficult and much poorer quality in this case because of the low light. It would be much better in daylight of course. I think the big issue is stillness if shooting vegetation outdoors, tripod or not. I would still use a tripod when possible though. 

 

The Micro-Nikkor 55 is one of my all time favourite lenses

I was shooting at very high ISO and correspondingly high shutter speeds. One interesting thing about doing that is that the noise of the individual images is almost eliminated in the composite result. I'd need to do a test with a tripod-exposed image, but as a guess I'd think that it's because of the alignment of the hand-held images that the individual "grains" of the noise don't line up and thus cancel each other out. One way or the other, graininess is much reduced in the final result so higher ISO can be used.

Edited March 6 by DDoug

[Ed Rooney]

In case you've not seen this:

 

https://edition.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/reviews/best-point-and-shoot-cameras?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc

 

 

[geoff s]

The Sony is clearly well liked but I wonder why the Panasonic LX100 mk2 doesn't get talked about as often ?

Seems to be equally well specified and has a larger sensor. Also I believe it has a more traditional dial- based rather than menu- based design which is another plus point in my opinion.

[M.Chapman]

3 hours ago, geoff s said:

why the Panasonic LX100 mk2 doesn't get talked about as often ?

It's a bit bigger so not quite as "pocket sized"?

 

Mark

Edited Thursday at 17:12 by M.Chapman

[Harry Harrison]

4 hours ago, geoff s said:

The Sony is clearly well liked but I wonder why the Panasonic LX100 mk2 doesn't get talked about as often ?

As Mark says, I think it is the size. In use it looks more like a small phone and no-one seems to bother about people using their phones in restaurants & shopping centres etc., all places where something that looks more like a camera might attract unwelcome attention - and yes, it's going to need a big pocket. Apart from that it should make a perfectly good Alamy walkaround camera.