White Atamasco Lily and Blended DOF

[gmitchel]

Here's another holiday flower. A white atamasco lily. This shot also uses three stacked shots to extend DOF.

http://www.thelightsright.com/files/...amascolily.jpg

I started in ACR 5.2. I selected the shots and then clicked on the Tools | Photoshop | Load Into Photoshop Layers menu item.

Inside Photoshop CS4, I used Edit | Auto-Align Layers with the Auto Projection option and then Edit | Auto-Blend Layers with the seamless Tones and Colors option. That stacked the layers and blended them.

After I stacked the shots in Photoshop CS4, I used the TLR Professional Sharpening Actions. TLR HRDC Capture Sharpening, TLR Clarity Enhancement. After recducing the photo to 1000 pixels wide and converting to sRGB, I used the TLR Web Output Sharpener.

This was shot under natural light with a Canon 1Ds MkII, Canon 180mm "L" Macro Lens, Gitzo tripod, Kirk BH-1 ball head.

The pistil for the flower extends well in front of the stamens. The stamens also varied in height. No way a single exposure, even at f/32 could get the DOF necessary when I was about 18 inches from the pistil of the flower. You'll see that even the pollen grains on the pistil are sharp.

Comments are welcome.

Mitch

[gmitchel]

Here is the result with 4 shots:

http://www.thelightsright.com/files/...mascolily2.jpg

It is a big improvement with regard to the pollen on the white petals. I had to take the photo down to 12 x 8 at 240 ppi and 8-bits per channel for this. Given that I used +2 exposure compensation, I pretty well nailed the exposure and I am also happy with the color. So, I foresaw no serious problem with 8-bits per channel.

What do you think? A significant improvement, isn't it!

Cheers,

Mitch