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EOS 90D Focus bracketing help for macro and landscape shots

manfred9
Contributor

I am trying to do some focus bracketing with my 90D. What I came up with so far is that it works in principal. But ...

Here is my understanding so far:
For focus bracketing to work you need Live View. In Live View the maximum focus points is with Zone AF - which is roughly a third of the view. As the number of pictures the camera take depends on the focus points activated while shooting this limits the result drastically. The object needs to be in the center of the frame which is manageable but not perfect for macro shots. But doesn't work for landscape photography.

I would be happy to wrong about this and I only need to change a setting, but I haven't found one yet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

That's great, Manfred!

I did find those *.bin files. I remembered seeing them once I checked one of my stacking directories. They are in a folder named DPP_DC_1 in the Root of the folder that I have my Raw files. If you run the stack again, another folder will be created named DPP_DC_2. In each of those folders there is a .DATA.bin followed by DC_001, DC_002, and so on to the end of the number of shots in the stack. Those are bin files that contain editing info for post touchup, not converted Raw files.

I found this on an older web site - The Digital Picture:

"the DPP compositing tool comes highly recommended, especially for some of its processing features including the ability to adjust the amount of background blur in a final stacked result. DPP creates a folder in the same folder the stacked result (JPG or TIF format) is being written to. Binary files are stored in this folder including a large file for each image used in the stack along with a data file. These files are required for the adjustment functionality and can be deleted after the image is finished."

Newton

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23 REPLIES 23

Hi Newton, there is a lot of good stuff in your post. Will look into it. Have a trial for Helicon running as well at the moment will look into your comments

Will have another go at DPP. I stopped looking further into it when some of the .tiff formats aren't showing.

Thanks.

ebiggs1
Legend
Legend

Although I have DPP 4 I am not a big supporter or user but I don’t think it supports focus stacking. Its strong attribute is lens correction.  And I do try other programs when time allows I always come back to the best IMHO and industry standard Photoshop.

EB
EOS 1DX and 1D Mk IV and less lenses then before!


@ebiggs1 wrote:

Although I have DPP 4 I am not a big supporter or user but I don’t think it supports focus stacking. Its strong attribute is lens correction.  And I do try other programs when time allows I always come back to the best IMHO and industry standard Photoshop.


EB, DPP 4 has supported focus stacking for quite a while, since Canon included Focus Bracketing in its cameras, and does a good job. They call it "Depth Compositing" and can be found in the DPP Tools menu. In fact, it's quite a bit simpler than PS where you have to d/l a plugin, merge and align layers, etc. I've tried (bought) the best dedicated stacking programs on the market and DPP is as good at it as any of them in IQ and post touchup tools, albeit way slower, but it is free and I have time if nothing else 🙂 I like to start my stacks with Raw and DPP is the only one that does that. Sure, you can load your Raw files into other stacking programs, but they are converted to DNG or TIFF or whatever, usually with Adobe DNG Converter, but they do not allow you to edit Raw and stack the actual Raw files like DPP does.

TBH, I let my PS and LR subscriptions expire when I realized that I was doing all I needed to do in DPP and PSP, the later mainly for framing and cropping. Granted, I don't do weddings and portraiture any more which I feel is where PS shines. Your clients want to see art. I do nature photography, now that I have retired, so all I need is a little sharpening, saturation of various colors to make them "pop" a bit, and some odds and ends that DPP provides adjustments for. My approach is to get the shot right in the first place so very little is needed in post.

Newton

I am trying the stacking with DPP4 on a 1 year old mac at the moment and it is still running after 1.5hours for a 15 image stack.

One of the first things DPP is doing is converting the raw files into .bin files. So, I don't think there is a difference to other software converting to dng or tiff. But they are way faster. I get results after 2 minutes.

Manfred


@manfred9 wrote:

I am trying the stacking with DPP4 on a 1 year old mac at the moment and it is still running after 1.5hours for a 15 image stack.

One of the first things DPP is doing is converting the raw files into .bin files. So, I don't think there is a difference to other software converting to dng or tiff. But they are way faster. I get results after 2 minutes.

Manfred


Hello, Manfred!

I'm using a 3 y/o Dell XPS 17 running Windows 10 Pro with just 16GB of RAM and it only takes 10-15 minutes to stack 20 shots from my 45mp R5, depending on if I used lens correction, NR, or other adjustments. The longest it's ever taken me to run a stack was 1.53 hours, and that was a 100 shot stack from my R5. Small stacks (20) like this from my 5D mark IV, R6, or R6 mark II are much faster.

As for making or converting Raw to a BIN file, I've never noticed that behavior in Windows.

Newton

Hi Newton, it seems very long. I am running another test. Since it took so long, I had the time what was happening in the folder of my images. I saw a subfolder created containing for each of my images a .bin image. So I assume this is the raw conversion done before the stacking operation.

Hey there, Manfred!

If you want, post your stack on a sharing site and I will d/l and look to see why some of your shots weren't included, and run the stack myself to see what's going on with the time to render. That is just way to long in my experience. I will be happy to do that.

Newton

Raw, of course 🙂

Thanx for the DPP4 info, you're never too old to learn. 🤔

EB
EOS 1DX and 1D Mk IV and less lenses then before!

"... PS where you have to d/l a plugin, ..."

I am using PS 25 and I don't need a plugin to focus stack?

"... merge and align layers, ..."

Do you mean group layers? Edit > Auto-Align Layers. Leave Auto selected in the Auto-Align Layers click, OK. 

 

If you did exposure bracketing, also, while shooting, you need to first combine each set of exposures before stacking.

EB
EOS 1DX and 1D Mk IV and less lenses then before!
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