Category Archives: Macro

Getting up close.

Helicon Focus – improved

Macro, Software

Even better

When I first wrote about Helicon Focus some five months ago, an improved Mac version was “….2 weeks away” – the developer’s words, not mine.

Helicon Focus (mine is the ‘Pro’ version) allows you to stitch together a collection of differentially focused images, taking the sharp zones from each to make an overall sharp composite with seemingly vast depth of field.

Well, my version (3.79) has just been updated to 4.0.1 and it does a better job on really tough images.

Here’s the rendering of the 10 images of the silk flower I originally used to show what this magic application can do:


A composite of ten images. 5D, 100mm macro at f/2.8. Helicon Focus Pro Version 3.79

The flower was both very close to the image plane in the camera and at an acute angle thereto.

And here is the composite image assembled from the same ten original images using 4.0.1:


The composite image assembled with Helicon Focus Pro 4.0.1

The differences are clear – in fact the developer used my images to test the new version after I had submitted them for review.

Congratulations to Danylo and his team – it was not for nothing that this journal named Helicon Focus the best application of 2008. And it was worth the wait!

Anyone using the best in digital gear – full frame or medium format – involved in industrial or close-up photography should have this application on his Mac or PC. That and a sturdy tripod to make sure the camera does not move between exposures. Your clients will love you.

Software of the Year

Macro, Software

A run away winner.

Until a fellow photographer pointed me to the inspired application known as Helicon Focus this award would easily have gone to Adobe’s Lightroom. Having switched from the slowness and bugginess of Aperture to the logical, modal work flow of Lightroom, I remain delighted with that application’s great user interface and with the fact that one application provides processing, digital file management, printing, web and book output, and it gets better with each new release. Best of all, except for some sluggishness in the adjustment brush in LR 2, which Adobe is working on, the application flies on just about any computer made in the past 5 years. Ever said that of Apple’s offerings? Best of all is the fact that LR has made visits to Photoshop increasingly rare and, hopefully in some future version, the horror that is Photoshop’s interface can be well and truly forgotten. Meaning that Adobe will add perspective correction to LR, the only significant feature missing for this photographer.

But my new found interest in macro and my ‘discovery’ of Helicon Focus (thanks to a fellow photographer) leave me in no doubt that is is far and away the most innovative and well engineered application I have learned in 2008. It simply opens up the world of close-focus and macro to heretofore impossible pictures. The fact that it’s been around for several years only speaks to the maker’s poor marketing – they should be telling the world about this brilliant piece of programming.

Here’s the sort of subject Helicon Focus excels at – I took several differently focused pictures and combined these into one sharp whole, using Helicon.


5D, 100mm Canon Macro, ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 100, tripod. Composite of four pictures. Click the picture for the Helicon site.

The big print hanging at home is, simply stated, a show stopper. The starfish pops off the surface of what is a pretty low key print. Helicon Focus has taken close-ups out of the laboratory and made them accessible to all, whether your subject is seen through a microscope or a very long lens with limited depth of field, no matter the aperture. With the 100mm Canon Macro the whole process is a dream. Add a ring flash to provide some relief in the shadows and you have a very powerful tool set. Very well done Danylo and the whole team. I have read about like functionality in Photoshop CS4 and it’s so poorly implemented and so complex, I doubt anyone at Helicon is losing sleep, especially when you compare prices.

Helicon Focus is my pick for Software of the Year.

There’s a close runner up for the Software of the Year award and that is Bruji’s suite of database products.


Click the picture for Bruji’s web site

I use DVDpedia for movies and Bookpedia for my photography books – click in the right hand column and you will see the nice, clean web output these cataloging tools generate. These applications work well on the Mac but just sing on the iPhone; update something on the Mac and the iPhone will sync the changes when asked, if it is in wi-fi range of your Mac. It works perfectly every time and you can take your database of movies and books with you wherever you take your iPhone. Simple, superbly supported by an enthusiastic team and far better than the slow, clunky Delicious Library which I used earlier – an application that puts looks before speed. There’s something very warming about emailing for help and getting a quick, enthusiastic response from one of the Bruji developers. An experience you will never have with Adobe, Apple or Microsoft. Well done, Bruji!

The 400mm close-up lens

Macro, Technique

Helicon to the rescue.

Go to Helicon’s web site and you will, understandably, see many examples of the use of this application in insect photography. That’s a natural given the miniscule depth of field for such small subjects in extreme close-up.

But how about at the other end of the spectrum, when used with really long lenses?

Well, it turns out Helicon Focus is every bit as capable.

In the following example I was taking snaps of the maple tree, in full fall color, at a very close distance (maybe 15 feet) using the 400mm lens at maximum aperture. This renders the background as a complete blur, but also very much restricts depth of focus in the subject, as this picture discloses:


Maple leaves. 5D, 400mm ‘L’, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 250

I took nine images with the lens on manual focus focusing through the depth of the subject. Helicon refused to combine these, so I took out the first and last (which, on closer examination, had nothing sharp anywhere) and tried again. Success.


Composite of seven images using Helicon Focus. Manual exposure setting.

Why not simply close down the aperture and take one snap? First, that would dictate a very slow shutter speed with the attendant risk of camera shake even though the camera was mounted on a solid tripod. Second, there’s no guarantee at these short distances that everything would, in fact, be sharp, as 400mm lenses have little depth of field at any aperture, and depth-of-field preview in SLRs is near useless at small apertures. The Helicon approach generates an image which simply pops from the background while in no way changing the blur. Formerly blurred twigs now no longer detract from the image and the result is dramatic and natural looking.

Snags? Well, your subject has to be stationary, you must use a tripod and on close examinaton you can see some ghosting here and there:


Detail of ‘ghosting’ in the combined image

But when you realize that this enlargement is consonant with a print size of 40″ x 30″ and the effect is not objectionable, it’s something I can easily live with when balanced against the advantages of the technique. And who knows? When Danylo Kozub and his fellow geniuses at Helicon release the much awaited updated Mac version maybe even this minor issue will be resolved?

So Helicon is not just for the macro and microscope photographers amongst us.

More Helicon macros

Macro, Photographs, Technique

Make your macros sing.

I wrote about Helicon Focus recently and for this new inductee to the macro world it’s fair to say that the software opens up new realms in macro photography. This application requires that you take several pictures of your subject, each focused slightly differently, after which it applies some serious processing to stitching together the sharp zones of each into one sharp whole. Magic!

Now your subject must be still and you need to use a tripod (unless you are very lucky doing this handheld, which I think is a long shot) to permit proper stitching of the sharp zones from your constituent images.

I import the originals into Lightroom in the normal way and stack them using the ‘time between pictures’ slider, which allows automatic stacking of pictures taken close together. I then export the stack in TIFF, making sure there are no export size constraints in the Image Sizing section of the export panel. The exported images are then dropped into Helicon Focus, I hit ‘Run’ and ‘Save’, then import the composite image back into Lightroom where it is added to the top of the stack, like so:

The deeper the required depth of focus the more images you need. For reasonably square on subjects with some depth I find 3-5 images works fine. For more drastically sloped ones, more may be needed. Digital film is cheap! Take too many rather than too few. The processing times in Helicon on my MacBook (C2D) are short – four uncompressed 72 mB TIFFs are combined into one new one in the space of thirty seconds. These are full frame TIFFs generated by Lightroom from the RAW originals taken on my Canon 5D.

Even though these images were taken at f/22, the close focus distance and the 100mm focal length of the Canon macro lens make for very shallow depth of field, so I simply set the lens to manual focus, focus on the nearest part of the image and take a picture, repeating with a small adjustment of the focus ring every 8 seconds, the time it takes for my ring flash to recycle to full power. That’s important – you really want your images identically exposed.

And here is the result – taken yesterday after more time spent wading in the tide pools at my top secret Highway One location on the Pacific coast, 22 miles west of home. This chap was hanging out on the underside of a big boulder waiting for high tide. If you do this sort of work, check the tide tables before you go – the best being revealed at low tide. He is maybe 3″ in diameter.


Starfish. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Four constituent images.

Do this sort of thing at sunset with glancing rays from the sun and add a touch of ring flash to reduce the contrast range and make all tones easily visible (much easier than doing HDR), and you get something like this:


Kelp at sunset. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/45, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Five constituent images.

It’s no surprise if I tell you that the Canon Macro plus Helicon Focus are in the running for my Best Gear of 2008 award.

If you want to see Helicon Focus applied in the more traditional area of photomicrography, take a look at the beautiful images crafted by Charles Krebs.

Helicon Focus

Macro, Software

An insanely great application.

Now and then an application comes along which truly must be graced with the Insanely Great accolade, especially now that Apple has ceased making insanely great products and prefers to focus on insanely great sales instead.

That application is Helicon Focus from some programming geniuses in the Ukraine which, by the time you read this, will doubtless be a part of the USSR again.

Simply stated, Helicon Focus asks that you make several pictures of a subject with the focus slightly different in each, so that your range of pictures has something sharp in each plane. The application then merges the images for one overall sharp one.

Pictures beat words, so here’s one of the six originals I took of that much abused currency, the US dollar. Doubtless it’s illegal to photograph currency, but when the subject in question is worthless, it’s no longer currency right? Here’s the first of six snaps, with the focus at the far end:

Now here is the composite of six originals, each with slightly different focus points, after processing in Helicon Focus. The slight image magnification is conferred by the application to allow for image size changes between the component pictures. It’s something you can adjust in the application’s Preferences. Suffice it to say that the default setting of 4% magnification seem to work pretty well, so make sure you leave a little space around your subject to allow for this magnification:

Look carefully and you will see an out-of-focus band around the ‘A’ in ‘America’ – I should have taken more snaps with smaller focus adjustments. The lens was set on manual focus and the camera on manual exposure.

You can either use a stationary camera and adjust focus or use a focus rail to move the camera. The latter approach avoids image size changes but as the program adjusts image sizes when blending, if you use the stationary camera approach, I fail to see the advantage of a focus rail. If you use ring flash you should use a stationary camera as otherwise your lighting intensity will vary between component pictures.

Mind blowing! Insanely Great!!

So any time you need extreme depth of field and your subject is stationary, this $30 application is just what the doctor ordered.

All six snaps were taken on a Canon 5D with the 100mm macro lens at maximum aperture, for minimum depth of field. Helicon Focus reads many formats, including the RAW originals used here. Processing (MacBook, 2.1gHz C2D) took maybe 40 seconds and the interface is completely intuitive.

For those with high speed motor drives I imagine you could just set the camera on Continuous and move the focus ring as you bang away.

Well done Helicon Focus and let’s all pray you avoid the clutches of Mother Russia. Heck, you can always ask the French to save you ’cause sure as hell we will not. And for those of you who enjoy locking up now and then, Helicon Focus also comes in a Windows version. Either way, an available premium version of the application takes advantage of multi-core CPUs so if you use a computer with Intel’s drop dead (Insanely Great!) Core2Duo or Core4Duo or whatever, your processing speed will be nice and fast.


A composite of ten images. 5D, 100mm macro at f/2.8.

I’m using the Canon macro at f/2.8, its maximum aperture here, so as to push the application hard; realistically you would expect to stop down to take advantage of the lens’s sweet spot as well as to reduce the number of exposures required. For this lens, f/8 to f/11 seems best. You can see some overlap issues on the right of the above image – something I will address in a subsequent piece.

Disclosure: After writing the above I was given a free registered version of Helicon Focus by Dan. While it’s always nice to get things free, remain assured that my objectivity is not about to get corrupted. Sure, like all of us I can be bought, but it will cost you a sight more than $30! Thank you Dan.

Postscript: I shared the constituent RAW files for the above image with Dan Kozub of Helicon to see what was causing the slightly imperfect alignment visible in places. Dan wrote back that a new, enhanced version of the application would be out in about a month and would fix the issue. He advised me that he had tried it with my images and all was well – so at least it wasn’t me! In fairness to Helicon, this was a pretty extreme test given the closeness of the flower and the flower’s extreme angle to the plane of the camera’s sensor.

For some more practical ‘in the field’ tests, please click here.