Phocus Focus Stacking

[jrydberg]

Hi!

Would love if Phocus could add support for focus stacking. The actual merging of the images isn't what interest me, but the automation of driving the focus and taking the images. Since the system is vertically integrated, and Hasseblad controls pretty much all aspects, it should be possible to get something awesome working.

[BradP]

Even I can't believe how much I agree with you.   If H wants to give us exceptional macros and landscapes, there couldn't be many more seemingly easy Phocus or firmware improvements.  It's a function of lens length, aperture, focal distance and the number of shots to move through the intended field of focal points.

To be sure the engineers understand it, for a macro of a flower where one wants bokeh in the background but critical resolution of the flower, one might want 20 shots moving focus through the flower only.  For a landscape with sharpness from 2' to infinity, one might want 5 or 20 shots.  For people shooting bugs, they sometimes want a hundred or more shots. Why focus stack?  Diffraction at high f-stops limits resolution and image quality, and there are bokeh vs resolution effects that can only be achieved by stacking.  Wind, changing light and other movement in the frame are the enemies. Rapid automation in capture greatly assists. 

Personally, a Phocus software solution to integrate/process the images isn't needed.  Photoshop does it well and other third party programs do it better.  I believe I even saw freeware.  Image processing would be much more difficult for H to develop and it could take years to catch up to Zerene Stacker.  The main thing you can help us with immediately is capture, like other manufacturers are beginning to do (e.g., P1, Nikon D850)

[bgateb]

this would be an amazing feature.

[maxnardi]

Absolutely agree. It's actually a semi deal breaker for any professional photographer highly involved in product photography. Phocus already control focus and exposition so I think can be a relatively simple function to implement.
We have a couple of high end world clients in the studio. For still life (watches) we ended using mirrorless even if quality is just "good enough" over Hasselblad just for the hassle doing hundreds of images requiring focus stacking.