I've always wondered about doing something like this. Could we see the two original shots for comparison?
I do like the image, BTW ;-) >>> "Digital Image Studio" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 7/25/2007 8:56 AM >>> I have plenty of time so I might as well preface the pic with a story: I was mucking about in the back-yard today shooting my little captive model and I noticed an interesting little flower in the lawn (yes it's a flower shot so stop reading now if you suffer from anthophobia ;-). So I thought, I might take a few shots before I chop it up into mulch with the lawn mower. Thankfully I was shooting with my *ist D (it still gets a lot of work) fitted with my A50/2.8 macro (subject didn't seem worth changing lenses or cracking out a tripod for), so I laid down on the grass and took a few hand held shots at 1:2 mag. Since it was in the shade I dialed up the shade WB setting, ISO 400 and Av at f5.6, this left me at 1/40s so I got a few shots in between wind gusts. The aperture/shutter speed was a bit of a compromise, I had just enough shutter speed to get a sharp shot but the DOF was just a bit narrow. PP to the rescue, I found two shots with sufficiently differing planes of focus to give me a decent overall effective DOF and I set about combining the images. I used my pano package Hugin to align, scale and re-render the two converted RAW images (applied my custom calibration but no WB change). I then placed one image on the other as a layer and used a feathered erase tool to reveal the sharp areas of the image underneath. I then merged the images and applied curves and sharpening etc to the composite. The process may sound a little convoluted but for me it's pretty quick as I know the Hugin package quite well however the big advantage of the process is the ability to isolate the subject whilst maintaining sufficient DOF at the subject plane. Granted it's been pretty heavily manipulated but I'll leave you to decide whether the technique works or not. Little weenie size pic: http://picasaweb.google.com/distudio/PESO/photo#5091108463691284690 Bigger temporary pic (1.5MB): http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~aglcnews/temp/IMGP21389-IMGP21392.jpg Compliments and criticisms welcome. Cheers, -- Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://picasaweb.google.com/distudio/PESO http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~distudio//publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net !SIG:46a74bca269071854013472! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
