D850 Stacking

[Andrea B.]

While this post is not technically a UV/IR experiment, I FINALLY got around to trying out the stacking feature of my Nikon D850. And thought I might as well show everyone an example.

 

At first glance D850 stacking seems to be very good. Figuring out the "step" size takes a bit of trial and error, but there are charts available to help with that.

 

I'm using Zerene Stacker.  So there's another learning curve!  Which is better Pmax or Dmap?? And how do you set "Set Contrast Threshold". No clue!! But I'll figure it out eventually. 

 

Here are my first two stacks. 

No retouching done yet. I'm just trying to see if the depth of the flower stack was covered by my D850 settings. (And the forum software will have resized these.)

 

D850 + Micro-Nikkor 60/2.8G ED

Aperture Mode f/5.6 @ISO-64

Indoor ambient skylight with Normal Auto WB

 

50 shots were made at Step 3 with no exposure smoothing (light is stable). No edits were made to the raw NEFs prior to converting them to TIFFs for Zerene stacker. My Zerene license has expired so I could not export a final TIFF or JPG. Thus I'm showing you two screen shots of the results.

 

The D850 stacking works!! You can even see some in-focus cat hair, dust, and whatnot.

 

This is going to be so cool!! And it is very easy.

 

Dmap

 

 

Pmax

 

 

[Andrea B.]

Here are some 100% crops from the results.

 

This is at the back of the flower group.

 

 

The stray fiber moved during the sequence.

This area is also at the back of the group.

 

 

Cat hair, yuk!!

This flower is at the front right.

 

 

Some supplemental light would have been useful. I'll do that when I make some progress on the learning curve.

This flower is at the front middle.

[Andrea B.]

The fine details have been nicely captured and stacked.

 

Let's give one of those a dash of contrast and a bit of detail enhancement. The other will get contrast and sharpening.

 

Contrast + sharpening

 

 

 

Contrast + detail

[Andrea B.]

Now it is time to go pay for a new Zerene Stacker license. 

 

 

[colinbm]

Wow, these are very good Andrea.

[dabateman]

@Andrea B.,

Watch this video it will help a lot:

 

[Andrea B.]

Col, the camera did all the work !! D850 seems to be very good at stacking.

 

David, thanks! This vid will be helpful for sure.

[Andrea B.]

Just for fun, I loaded these two images into Zerene Stacker. One visible and one UV. 

 

 

 

Here is the Pmax stack of the two images. (I cropped it.)

I'm guessing Zerene must have used a 50% opacity of each image?

 

[bobfriedman]

been using Zerene stacker for years.. 

FujiFilm GFX100S ,Rayfact VL 1.4x 122mm f/4.87
1/40s f/4.87 iso200 81-stack

 

[Lou Jost]

The forum Photomacrography.net, which shares many members with this forum, is run by the creator of Zerene, and there is a vast amount of very useful and authoritative information about stacking there. I recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about stacking and especially how Zerene works.

[bobfriedman]

I agree with Lou... best macro site out there is https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/

[Andrea B.]

Thanks Bob and Lou for the pointer to Photo Macrography !! I have visited this site in the past. But definitely will go there again now that I'm playing with stacking.

 

I got my Zerene key for the Basic version. I'll decide later whether to go up to the Prosumer version.

 

The D850 handles these stacks so well. Today I ran a few stacks on a twig of One-Seed Juniper. Here's one which shows the brown, male, pollen producing cones which are tiny little things - about 2-4 mm long.

(The amount of pollen they put out is astounding. Everyone around here hates Juniper pollen season.)

 

f/5.6 at ISO-64 with stacking set to 75, step 2.

Ambient indoor skylight.

Only the first 48 were used for a Zerene pmax stack.

Cropped and resized for presentation here.

 

 

Here is an unresized crop.

You can see the blurry twiglet on the lower right. I did not quite catch the front-most parts of this plant when setting up. I read that one should "start early and stay late" on stacking. I stayed too late and didn't start early enough. Mo' practice needed.

This is 884 x 884. The details are there for sure! No retouching or edits, but later on I'll figure out a detail or sharpening enhancement.

 

[colinbm]

The twig of One-Seed Juniper is cute.
Not a plant that I know, do they attach to rock ?

[Andy Perrin]

Wow, very nice Andrea!

[Andrea B.]

Not a plant that I know, do they attach to rock ?

 

No. That rock has 3 holes drilled in the top to hold flower stems or twigs. It does look like the juniper cutting is growing out of the rock! I think that rock was meant to be used as a pencil or pen holder, but to me it immediately looked useful for holding small botanical specimens for my photographic efforts. 

 

The junipers are large evergreen bushy shrubs which grow about 7-15 feet (2-5 meters) tall in our area, taller elsewhere. Scattered amongst them are pinyon pines which also grow in a shrub form. It is referred to as a pinyon-juniper "woodland", but it's more like a shrub-land. These evergreens provide habitat for lots of animals and birds. 

 

***********

 

Wow, very nice Andrea!

 

I'm still surprised at how easy it was. And fairly fast. The 48 stack (shown above) took Zerene about 5 minutes on this old 2019 Macbook. The series and the final stack do eat up a lot of space very quickly. 5 GB for this 48-stack. I'm thinking that I need to learn NOT to keep the series, only keep the final stack.

 

 

 

 

 

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[Tom Lewis]

Fantastic