Finally, I cracked

[Kit]

I have been messing about with Helicon and PS since 4.30 this afternoon, trying to make a nice, well focussed stack so I could go "I can do it too!". It is now 10.10pm, and I can't!! Helicon flat-out refused to save the resulting image - may be something to do with the woeful lack of memory in this here aged laptop and even PS baulked, muttering peevishly about "Not enough RAM, you tosser." until I saved and cropped and tried again. PS was not even in the game, though and there were large areas of fudgy blurriness. But I thought, I couldn't just biff a whole afternoon's work, so give you this, to laugh and snicker at behind your hands. Or even openly. ;D

[rasbury]

Welcome to the club.After taking many stacked shots of one of the guitars(the least being 28)I opened them up in raw only to find out that it would shuffle the order of the images when I saved the work to my Helicon folder.Through trial and error I now have to number the files individually with a three digit #,such as 001,002,003....etc.What fun....

[nickjohnson]

Bravo Kit. No snicker here!

Some suggestions – hope they help.

1) Assuming your doing this indoors with the camera on a tripod. Try taking pictures of a rule – with the numbers going front to back (ish). That will give you a repeatable benchmark so that you can develop a feel for how much to increment the focus for a given f stop.
2) When “developing” the individual RAW files be conservative with the sliders. It's very easy to make the stack look a bit crunchy.
3) Output the raw files as jpeg to start with and try stacking them that way first. The jpegs are much smaller and faster to stack than tiffs and that speeds the learning process up. On a PC with low physical memory most photo editing software becomes disk I/O bounded and very slow / unresponsive / buggy.

[macromeister]

How many shots are in the sequence that you are stacking? What is the distance from front to back? It looks at least 6 inches.

With regard to the bluriness - If you go to the parameters tab and select the spanner icon (on the right) you will get preferences. Try increasing the alignment figures. I had similar problems and it seemed to fix it.

[Kit]

Hokay, thanks guys, for the comments and suggestions. I did finally have to resort to jpegs to run that lot, as the RAWs just cludged up the machine. Rob - tis a standard egg carton, so about 6" I guess. There were 13 images in the stack - maybe it was just....unlucky, ha ha.

I think the real issue was that I was trying to take big steps far too early, as the images were of nice, hard-edged eggs and crate with very soft, fluffy feather in the mix. I am a bit inclined to box above my weight and go straight to the back of any instruction book. I will pick something a bit more defined for the next project.