Spider Stack

I found a very cooperative spider, so excuse me for changing the image.

I haven’t really done a proper stack since I built the Makrak, as it was simply not stable enough in the field for the job, mainly because of the floppy tripod. Also the speed of my computer at the time made processing extremely tedious, in fact it took many hours just to process a dozen stacked images. But now, with my new computer and a remote shutter release, some of the problems have been reduced.

18 months ago I was using Photoshop CS5, which didn’t do a very good job with the stacking, but now I have CS6 which not only does a superior job, but is a lot faster too.

Today’s image stack is built from 25 images, quarter millimetre apart and took me about 30 minutes to process. I did not have to do any dressing of the layers, despite the very large difference between the closest and furthest images. Not absolutely perfect, but I am very happy with the result.

The main problem that the software has to overcome, is that as you advance the camera half a millimetre at a time, the image gets bigger. First you have to do an edit-alignment. This rescales, rotates and shifts all the layers to get perfect alignment. Then the stack can be performed.

This is a 1200 pixel crop of the final image, to show the detail and depth that can be acquired with this technique. Try enlarging (L) and then zooming in (ctrl+++, to return ctrl zero).

Dave