03-12-2013, 11:55 PM
I used Helicon for several shots. Some things are - or better said, became great (in the beginning it was pretty buggy) after a while. I also use CamRanger's stack shooting capabilities, but then I need Helicon again to render the stack.
Sometimes Helicon has trouble with less contrasty regions - forget about doing low keys, highlights (when there's no texture in, like metallic surfaces) also cause problems.
The 3D thing I tried once. It was, at best, a good laugh. If there are holes, cavities or irregular surfaces in a weird angle on your subject, it will fail.
RAW - after a while I came to the conclusion, it's just blowing up disk-space, jpg is enough if you take care with lighting.
It's very interesting to use apertures like f/4 or f/5.6 which are normally useless in Macro regions. But here they give you outstanding sharpness and a clear cut between subject, back- and foreground - this can, as always, be exaggerated.
I'd appreciate, if Helicon Remote would not always make so much useless shutter action, but maybe I'de need to change the settings and switch off LiveView during stack shooting.
The manual isn't that great, some parameters are difficult to understand and it's not always clear what happens. As a Mac user, I think, the last update was in June 2012 - it's not been perfected... Windows users get more often updates.
It's based on a laptop - I'd prefer to go light out in the field., So CamRanger with an iPad/iPod is for me the better way to go. What's also nice, Helicon focus has panorama capabilities.
Sometimes Helicon has trouble with less contrasty regions - forget about doing low keys, highlights (when there's no texture in, like metallic surfaces) also cause problems.
The 3D thing I tried once. It was, at best, a good laugh. If there are holes, cavities or irregular surfaces in a weird angle on your subject, it will fail.
RAW - after a while I came to the conclusion, it's just blowing up disk-space, jpg is enough if you take care with lighting.
It's very interesting to use apertures like f/4 or f/5.6 which are normally useless in Macro regions. But here they give you outstanding sharpness and a clear cut between subject, back- and foreground - this can, as always, be exaggerated.
I'd appreciate, if Helicon Remote would not always make so much useless shutter action, but maybe I'de need to change the settings and switch off LiveView during stack shooting.
The manual isn't that great, some parameters are difficult to understand and it's not always clear what happens. As a Mac user, I think, the last update was in June 2012 - it's not been perfected... Windows users get more often updates.
It's based on a laptop - I'd prefer to go light out in the field., So CamRanger with an iPad/iPod is for me the better way to go. What's also nice, Helicon focus has panorama capabilities.