sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

I put my new lens on my "Everyday Carry Camera" for outdoor macro photography and I put my reversed series of lenses and bellows back on my tabletop macro/micro setup and I staged this small preserved cricket for a focus stacking session to check the performance of the setup.

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EnglishBrenda Loc: Kent, England

Excellent finish on this Cricket as always.

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

Thanks, Brenda. There are rumors that Spring is not far away and I'll be able to get back to the fields.

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

Beautiful details on this one.
Been wanting to ask: What sort of 'halo' issues do you get in your stacks?

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

Mark, the combination of lenses that I am using is working quite well for me. I do very little in post and 'ghosting and halos' are not an issue for me so I don't need to edit in the stacking software. If I have any issues, they are most often with white hairs which tend to show either diffraction or highlight blowouts although I'm not sure which.

There are times when I do a deep stack (front to back travel) that there will be something that appears to be transparent where it crosses over another part of the subject like a leg or antenna.

I don't know any better so I do things that experienced folks may think are weird. My depth of fields are absolutely flat with just a tip of a hair in focus as you can see in this "first image of stack" of the Brown Recluse Spider. If you look closely and squint your eyes you can imagine seeing the spider. Only the front most tip of a hair on a leg is in focus. This is why my stacks are so large in the number of shots that I have to take and how fine the travel between them are.

I most often shoot with my lens full open. I equate the reason to be that of when I use microscope objectives which have no aperture control.

Also, the effective f/stops are inverse when a lens is used in a reverse fashion from what is indicated on the ring which when stopped down will create more diffraction.

I have not experimented enough with the new 1X to 5X lens which is similar to the Canon MP-E65 so that may be a totally different experience with halo and ghosting at the higher magnification. I'll be using it on the Nikon Z6 which is also a new experience for me so between the two I'll have plenty to experiment with.

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Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

Interesting and inspiring that you don't have halo issues. It does plague many 'stackers', and I also get them. But I've seen stacks much worse than what I get. I wonder why there is such a difference in results with the halos.
As I understand it, as the software marches thru a stack, it works to remove groups of pixels with low contrast with each other (meaning out of focus areas) , replacing them with superimposed groups of pixels that contrast with each other (those marking in-focus areas). This works out well for things like hairs that are in front of other areas that also are in focus. Both the hair in the foreground and the focused area in the background are rendered into a focused stack.
But for a hair that is in front of an out of focus background that is never in focus in the stack -- the program can't deal with that completely. It resolves the hair from the frames where its in focus, but there was a halo of low contrast pixels from that same hair in frames where it was not in focus, hanging in front of a background that is also not in focus. Zerene is never 'told' to remove the out of focus hair pixels & replace them with the out of focus background pixels. So a halo of the hair is left, surrounding the hair.
Anyway that is what happens to me to some extent, and to others even worse. It might have to do with the angle of view from a microscope objective versus a macro lens. I also know that tone of the background effects it more. Dark backgrounds have lots of halos around things like hairs.
A solution that i might play with is to stack all the way back to a textured background behind a subject. The halos would presumable be removed since Zerene knows to replace those pixels with the focused background. Then, in retouching I could put up a frame where the background is well out of focus, and use the touch up brush to paint in the out of focus background around the hairs. Or something like that.

sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

Mark, you have a deep understanding of how Zerene functions and that's one of the benefits of following the Photomacrphotography forum where people like Rick can give expert advice on the functions of the program. There are many true masters there.

I tend to agree that alignment plays a part in keeping halos to a minimum. I've even seen where fellows will shine a laser through the viewfinder of the camera to align the subject. Again, I believe that an absolute flat depth of field plays a part as well. Then there are the colors and light reflection and absorbance of the subject as well that I believe come into play. You are also correct that software can only do what the software can do and to date there is no 'dehalo' function.