Helicon Focus and PS 4

[JonSegar]

Hi,

I am intending to try to produce some 'synthetic' depth of field macro images (by synthetic I mean artificial depth of field constructed by software, greater than available from the lens itself), and was intending to get Helicon Focus for this (I thought it was the only software available for this), but now I am hearing that PS4 (which I done have either), can achieve this as well.

Can anyone shed useful light here - assuming that I can get a mortgage to upgrade to PS$ (sorry PS4), is Helicon sufficiently better to warrant the additional purchase?

jon

[Richard Bledsoe]

I use CombineZM which is free and does a better job than Helicon Focus. The learning curve is a bit steeper though. The developer Allan Hadley has a forum for users and it is quite good. I have found Combine ZM to do a nicer job than CS4 so far.
Download CombineZM 1.0 - CombineZM - present your pictures in various different formats - Softpedia

Some of my flower stacks can be seen at
Picasa Web Albums - Richard Bledsoe

Have fun,
Richard

[JonSegar]

Richard,

Thanks for that (and apologies for the tardy reply).

I was aware of CombineZM, but had not thought about it since it appears to be windows only (and I use Mac), but I am having good success running various things within VMware Fusion, which allows emulation of the windows environment, so I guess it would be possible to do that.

BTW I like the flowers

jon