Increasing Depth of Field in Close-up Photography, Adobe Lightroom Pre-release

MAXIMIZING DEPTH OF FIELD
Almost a year ago, I started to write a post about a method of increasing depth of field in close-up photography, and then got distracted. The post has been sitting out in my “drafts” queue ever since. The topic is resurfacing now, because of some information we received during the Meadowlark Nature Photography Expo we attended this past weekend. Yes, I’m just getting around to discussing some of the things we learned in two-and-one-half days of seminars.

There are a couple of software packages available that allow you to combine a series of photographs with limited depth of field, through use of a special algorithm, to obtain a sharp image. The programs were actually developed for photomicrography — taking pictures through a microscope — where the depth of field can be measured in microns. As it turns out, the process is equally useful for macro and close-up photography, and even landscapes to obtain images with very tightly controlled depth of field.

The first software I became aware of (and the software that was mentioned over the weekend) is Helicon Focus. The web site shows some interesting examples of how the process works. It also lists the pricing. The other program I found last March to accomplish the same task was CombineZ5 (now CombineZM). While CombineZM does not have a flashy web site, nor as many bells and whistles, it is free.

My initial interest in using the program was going to be in photographing models and model railroads. In capturing the images for Howard Zane’s book, I was having to stop down to the smallest aperture available, and use really slow shutter speeds.  Even with several thousand watts of lights, exposures were still seconds long at f/22! This kind of exposure, of course, has great depth-of-field (but, sometimes not quite enough — click the picture at left to see what I mean), but that comes at a cost — additional noise due to the long exposure, and lack of critical sharpness due to various optical considerations. A lens with the iris closed all the way down is not as sharp as one closed down to, say, f/11. Physics and math are involved, and let’s just not go there.

Anyway, a program like Helicon Focus or CombineZM allow you to take a series of images with reasonable depths of field of the same subject (hopefully, nothing moves during the sequence), and automatically combine them into an image that appears to be sharp through the whole scene — or as much or as little as you want!

At some point soon, we’ll begin to play a little with CombineZM here. From there, we can decide if the technique is something we want to pursue, and if so, whether it justifies the cost of Helicon Focus.

ADOBE LIGHTROOM EXITS BETA
Adobe is finally just about ready to ship Adobe Lightroom version 1.0. For a limited time, they’re offering the new program at a special price of $199 through their online store. I mentioned this a few days ago, and mentioned that I already have much of what Lightroom has to offer. However, over the past weekend, we got to see a demonstration by George Lepp using the release version.

Adobe have added a huge amount of functionality since the public beta release that I’ve been using. Some of these new features will also be available in the upcoming Photoshop CS3 release.

Some of the most interesting new features include a simplified tool for using curves, a new “recovery” tool to help bring out detail in badly exposed images, a new “vibrance” control that does a sort of automatically selective saturation boost or cut, and a host of other neat new features. There are a whole bunch of online tutorials that explain these functions far better than I can. That said, it looks to me as if Lightroom can be used as a pseudo replacement for Bridge,photo organizer, a RAW processor and somewhat-more-than-basic photo editor, all rolled into one! I know we’ll be ordering at least one copy!