i recently focus bracketed this fern and i’m curious if it can be stacked with open source software, how that looks and i’m curious what you all will do with this picture.
This file and all others accessible by the link are licensed CC0
I am going to have to come back to this one later. You want to do focus stacking like this. I believe Hugin can do and ImageJ can do it. But I will have to experiment. There would be other programs as well. Does not the camera’s manufacturer supply software capable of focus stacking. Canon does for my Canon but I couldn’t get it to accept JPGs from your pictures.
I don’t think that Sony does and if they do, it’ll only be for cameras that natively support focus bracketing. My A7iii is too old for that but Tamron (probably accidentally) implemented it in their latest lens firmware
Interesting challenge and thanks for sharing… never tried focus bracketing… so not sure I am in a position to answer your question
Here’s a quick interpretation using RT bit of adjustment globally for shadows and highlights… (poor light where I am working, so hope this all looks ok on everyone’s screens…)
Has anyone here tried this:
It apparently does not accept RAW data, so input files need to be processed and converted to TIFF or some other format. One could do that in darktable - edit one raw file to taste, and in the lighttable copy history and paste on to the other images. Then paste onto the other images and export the set.
This one worked very well when I tested it on a few stacks:
that indeed looks decent
depth math
affinity while not foss it’s currently free
i think that it did a significantly better job than affinity and it was faster
Next time, please limit yourself to about HD resolution, and 1-2 MB per image.
I just tested affinity and sadly there are some artefacts around the leaves. Maybe a little movement between shots?
I just tested the Shine Stacker. First I converted the RAW files in darktable to JPGs. I could have converted to Tiff files if I preferred. I made sure the same corrections were applied to every RAW file before conversion by pasting my settings. I then downloaded and installed Shine Stacker on my Windows 11 computer. The process was relatively straight forward and I feel the job is very good with no obvious artefacts. I would be interested in seeing other FOSS software demonstrated here for focus stacking. This one did a good job. Thanks @Luca_Lista
quick improvised vkdt composite:
focus stack blend mode in the blend module.
you can tell it has some alignment issues, especially near the boundaries 
it loads the reference file and the others as a sequence, aligns them, and blends the result:
AWP04921.ARW.cfg (4.5 KB)
Thanks for the vkdt version! I just started playing a few weeks ago, and stacking was on my to-try list.
