Hi all,
My friend and colleague Erik (from the Aquatimer Cousteau Chrono with orange bezel) brought me a special edition of the photography magazine 'Focus' with a special about macro photography.
Probably all here who have tried some kind of Macro shots will know that the very limited Depth of Field makes it extremely hard to take nice, detailed pictures of a watch or movement.
It's a good thing that these days, CPU power doesn't cost much and there are plenty of tools to overcome the problem. Some are expensive, others even free and/or Open Source.
This evening, I had my first shot (several, literally) at this and here is the result:
Just for this time, I saved it at a higher resolution (1920x1280) and in 95% Jpeg quality instead of the usual 85%.
As you can see, the entire dial is perfectly in focus. This is because the image is built of a stack of 24 images, all aligned with a tool called "align_image_stack" that comes with the free software package called "Hugin" and then these aligned images are "enfused" with another free tool called "EnfuseGUI".
The computation time for the entire process is a bit less than ten minutes and together with taking the pictures, it takes about 30 to 45 minutes to get one image with the enhanced Depth of Field.
The result you see here was my second try, I first tried it with just 6 images of a smaller part of the dial. Once I saw the result, I shot the series of 24 images and generated the above image.
Below the first, 13th and 24th image of the series. You can clearly see the shift of the focus from left to right:
I hope you like it, in my opinion it's worth the time but it makes it hard to produce large quantities of images and a tripod and steady environment are a must.
This doesn't mean it has to be expensive though!
Kind regards,
Clemens
