Tripods & Focus Stacking in the Tabernas Desert

[@brianmckeever5280]

I wonder how many people on this side of the pond know about the only desert in Europe!

[@chriswright.photography]

Very few I should think! Spain has an outstanding variety of landscapes but people only think of the beaches. There's also Dungeness in the uk, that's a designated desert apparently but very small compared to Tabernas. Wonderful place for photography.

[@careylymanjones]

When you are focus stacking, do you stack the raw images, or do you process the raw images in something like Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab, and stack the jpgs?

[@chriswright.photography]

I always do the stacking first and process the resulting file. You'll get better results from stacking RAW or DNG or even Tiff files than jpegs as there is more information in these formats. Also the images need to be exactly the same in terms of light and tone, otherwise it can look weird when you stack them. I'll do a full focus stacking video including the processing. Also worth mentioning that some modern cameras will do focus stacking in camera.

[@careylymanjones]

@@chriswright.photography I can see where you would need the light to match. I was thinking in terms of noise reduction, if the images were shot in low light. DxO is more limited in noise reduction with non-RAW images. You also lose your best sharpening tools. I had been thinking in terms of doing only sharpening and noise reduction on the RAW images, exporting them, and then stacking, cropping, and doing any other adjustments to them. DxO's noise reduction and sharpening tools are so good that I hate to give them up.

[@chriswright.photography]

@@careylymanjones Good point. Because DxO doesn't support focus stacking, I do this in Photoshop, either manually or by using the scripted option. You can do sharpening post merge, using Nik Sharpener which is very effective, noise is a different matter. I can see there's the possibility of an end to end video and as part of that I'll experiment with running PureRAW on the files pre merge or simply exporting from PhotoLab. The optical corrections only option should work.

[@careylymanjones]

@@chriswright.photography I've never used NIK Sharpener. Does NIK Sharpener use the DxO optics modules? One of the things I really love about PhotoLab is the way the optics modules make sharpening easier. I almost never have to use Unsharp Mask, since I switched to PhotoLab, at least if there's a module for my lens.

[@chriswright.photography]

@@careylymanjones I actually prefer Nik Sharpener to Unsharp Mask. It comes in two parts - PreSharpener which shouldn't be used if you've already applied the optics module and Sharpener which is very powerful indeed. It is a great way to draw attention to an element in an image.