I recently got into macro photography and have a bit of experience in image processing software. I’ve been trying to understand the software behind focus stacking by building my own in Octave/Matlab, but that has hit a snag where it can’t handle more than 5 images to stack at once. I was wondering how difficult it would be to prototype and build up my understanding through adding it to my own local copy of DarkTable, and what my options for doing so are? (Would I need to build my own binary, can it be a lua script or plugin?)
I’ve read the darktable developer docs on hacking vs developing and I recognize that this is definitely hacking. I’m not trying to get this merged into upstream but just want to see if I could get anything remotely usable locally.
I think you’re likely to get a lot of different opinions from people here. Personally I think it’d be a lovely addition to dt, but if you’re just trying get focus stacking working (as in, write some piece of software that does focus stacking) then you’re probably better off doing it out side of darktable, that’d mean that eventually it is integrated via a lua script.
There are a couple of projects that already do focus stacking and are foss that maybe you want to contribute to, fork, or otherwise improve: https://github.com/PetteriAimonen/focus-stack (cli only, seems good for microsocpy work, but leaves a lot of artifacts when used for photographic macro work when I tested it) and GitHub - noah-peeters/ChimpStackr: free, multi-platform focus stacking software (gui and cli, but the packaging is a mess and I never got it to run, the samples from the project author look great though).
At any rate, welcome to the community, and as someone who just got their first macro lens, looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
@dansnyder if you could get focus stacking to work in DT there would be a lot of happy people if it got incorporated into the DT build. Good luck with your efforts.