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A durable gift.


Sagitar
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In 2017 our son gave his mother a cymbidium orchid as a birthday present. It was in full bloom and the blooms lasted a long time. We decided to try to grow the plant on and we kept it on a South facing window sill throughout 2018 and tended it carefully, but no more blooms did we see.

A friend suggested that it might do better in a cooler spot, so towards the end of last year we moved it to a North facing window and carried on with the same care programme.

A few weeks ago we were delighted to see that a few flower buds were appearing and eventually we counted seven of them. Several of them are now in full bloom and today I took some pictures. It really has proved an excellent gift.

20190415Orchid01.jpg.7010acf092f7ce18b74705b6a5403b00.jpg 

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  • 1 month later...

The orchid reached full bloom and I thought I ought to take some  pics before it goes over.

DSCF1466.jpg.de0b6966a3f14774c2a8e8300c2c66f3.jpg

I've been playing with some new photo software called Affinity. I'm still learning how to use it and I'm not nearly as adept at using it as I am with Photoshop.

The PS subscription has become far too expensive for the amount of processing that I do now so I need to find  something else. I think Affinity could be what I need but the learning curve might be long and steep . . . . :(

 

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On 17/05/2019 at 00:13, Sagitar said:

The orchid reached full bloom and I thought I ought to take some  pics before it goes over.

DSCF1466.jpg.de0b6966a3f14774c2a8e8300c2c66f3.jpg

I've been playing with some new photo software called Affinity. I'm still learning how to use it and I'm not nearly as adept at using it as I am with Photoshop.

The PS subscription has become far too expensive for the amount of processing that I do now so I need to find  something else. I think Affinity could be what I need but the learning curve might be long and steep . . . . :(

 

Great photo, did you add the black background yourself?

I read about Adobe were no longer going to support older versions of CS, trying to force people to upgrade to their cloud software. I am still on CS4 and will not be upgrading if I can help it. It was much better and cheaper when you paid a one off fee rather than paying monthly like they do now. 

Have you paid for Affinity or using a trial? 

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The black background is our TV (switched off of course).

I was using a trial version of Affinity when I processed the picture of the Orchid, but I've bought it now. 

It was when I read about Adobe's intention to prevent me from using software that I had paid for that I decided it was time to go elsewhere.

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  • 1 month later...

One of the nice features of Affinity is focus stacking. It  works very simply. Focus stacking uses multiple images of an object with a small shift of focus in each image. It's particularly helpful in macro photography and it enables the photographer to get the whole of a subject in focus by merging multiple images. Affinity has a very neat function for merging the multiple images.

The painful part of this technique used to be the production of the multiple images. It needed a focusing rack on which the camera was mounted so that you could move the camera by a series of small increments taking a picture after each movement. Having taken enough pictures to cover the distance from front to back of the subject, the pics would be merged in software to get a single picture in which the whole of the subject is in focus.

Recently some cameras (including my FUJI XT3) have provided a function that automatically takes a series of pictures with the focusing plane moved for each picture.

The example below shows a focus merged picture taken at a distance of about 500mm with an 80mm macro lens. The focus merged pic is made from about twenty individual images, starting with an image focused on the knurled ring at the front of the camera and finishing at the rearmost visible part of the subject.

I think you can see that the whole of the subject is sharp, but the background is completely out of focus.

20190719X10merged.jpg.9f8f07aa482570a0ba211f82ae9d6e67.jpg

 

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You need to tell me what you mean by the bokeh effect. 

My understanding of bokeh concerns the way in which out-of-focus areas are rendered. Different lenses give more or less pleasing renderings of out-of-focus areas. One of the key factors in bokeh is the extent to which the opening in the iris approximates to a circle. Generally, the more blades in the iris and the more it will give an opening that approximates to a circle, but the curvature of the edge of the blade also plays a part.

Focus stacking can be carried out with lenses that have good or bad bokeh characteristics. Only the rendering of the out-of-focus background will be affected.

The key advantage of focus stacking is the huge increase in depth of field that is achieved.

 

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If you take a single image as close up as this one is then only a small band will be in focus i.e. there is a very small depth of field.

If you move the camera forward a little and take another image it will again have only a small band in focus but it will be a different  band than in the first image. Do the same and again and again for a large number of images each with a different small band in focus. Now use some clever software to select all the bands that are in focus and merge them into a single image that is all in focus. That's what we call image stacking and focus merging.

Here is a single image from the stack that I used. You can see how little of it is in focus.

DSCF1888E.jpg.e3c9acc9ef1922372641367f56cfefec.jpg

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