unni

Thanks for the thread. Since developers are aware, a solution will come soon. Yes,mine is win7 bit 64. @dke

When I open a Nikon D3100 NEF file, the beta 1.7.0.258 closes immediately. It is opening jpeg and tiff files. My Nikon D7000 NEF files are opening. Rgds, Unni

Just checked Steve's website and the about page. You are a professional with decades of experience, great! Well, I am a hobbyist with very little hands on experience and diy resources. So my ideas and inputs may not work for pro use !

Good image with bright and contrasting colours and a softer edge region. As John mentioned,single image could also be almost covering the area of interest with good sharpness because the subject seems to be in a single plane. While shooting with microscope objective,I have noticed about 25 microns dof for a 5x objective but my 90mm Tamron macro gives much more at f8. If we examine focusmerged exposure at 400% or more some artifacts will be visible in certain areas. This can be painted out from layers but needs lot of time and patience. Comparing the final image with each of the 18 shots will give good insight into how optimisation can be done . One way is to select alternate images and do another stack. John, I have been doing lesser of photo editing over the last couple of months due to a sudden revival of my music hobby! Trying to learn fingerstyle guitar. Touching the acoustic guitar after 25 years. It's also a hobby and I have never learned guitar or music from a teacher. Internet is useful and I could complete learning Scarborough fair from the website learnguitarinlondon.com .

thanks @Kasper-V @John Rostron. the processing time per stack is about 30mts.as you mentioned, it leads to the final image as the output. there was an overall haze/lack of contrast which was rectified wonderfully by the dehaze feature of AP. the key to success is to have a setup which can move without axial errors. to achieve it professionally, we need linear guides which is expensive. i could achieve similar results with the heavy milling machine table and my crude dial! lighting diffuser is required to get even light and elimination of specular spots but with 1/128 power level and no diffusers, this image was fine, may be because wings are relatively a flat field case compared to other body parts which are more 3 dimensional.

Focus stacking with AP. It took about 30 mts for each image. No cropping, only small trimming of borders. Minimal editing like enhancing contrast only done. Subject: a dead moth which I accidentally came across in the stairway. Magnification: The field of view for 5X objective is around 5mm X 3mm and 10X about 2.5mm X 1.5mm. From internet I see that the length of one scale is about 0.20mm and width at tip 0.035 mm and distance between the fine longitudinal lines on a scale about 0.001mm. So the smallest feature just visible is about 1 to 2 microns (0.001 to 0.002mm) and 5 micron features are clearly seen. Camera: Nikon D3100 with 5X and 10X Plan achromatic metallurgical finite objective. Lighting: One flash Godox TT600 triggered by hotshoe mounted wireless trigger Godox X1N. Powerlevel 1/128, no diffusers. step movement: Milling machine table , each step was about 15 microns, manual turning. More details of setup: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/70721-flame-of-the-woods/ 10X objective, 95 images stack( eyes) 5X objective, 47 images stack(hair and scales of wings) 10X Objective , 40 images stack(scales on wings)

@atefoto Hello Aleksander, I have not used screen capture programs. So I am giving the process in steps. Sequence of processing: 1. Discarded two images which did not belong to the exposure bracket sequence. 2. Renamed the images as 1a to 1e, 2a to 2e, 3a to 3e. These are three sets of exposure bracketed images. 3. Each set seems to be taken with a large overlap of about 70%. Overlap of about 30% is sufficient. 4. Launch AP. 5. File>HDR Merge>Add> and select images 1a to 1e. Tick options Auto align, NR, Tone map. In the pop box, select perspective. 6. Save output as HDR1. 7. Repeat 5 above for the remaining two sets. 8. Now you have three images - HDR1, HDR2, HDR3. 9. File>New Panorama>Add. Now select the three images of 8 above. 10.Create the final panorama. I am not sure whether AP or photoshop can handle exposure bracketed panoramas or HDR. It will get confused and align the wrong images. This is the reason for the issues you noted. It is best to process each exposure bracket set separately and then make the panorama from the output of each set. Hope this helps ! Unni ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Did you have to do something special to get them aligned? No, nothing special done. all default settings. For serious panoramas, it is better to have a nodally corrected setup.

I downloaded the jpegs, made 3 sets of 5 images. Each set was put through HDR. This gave 3 images as output. The 3 HDR output images was treated in panorama mode to get the single final image. No other editing was done except slight exposure correction by curves at the right top quadrant area for clouds. The HDR processed within 3 minutes (per set of 5 jpegs). The second image is a quick hand manual exposure blending of just two images.

Below is a final image exposure blended manually using luminosity masks, intermediate LAB mode usage, USM, clarity . One mid and one high exposure was used as input and aligned as stack, ungrouped, saved as two tif images, then opened the tif images as layers. Regular processing done on layers after this stage.(There is no pano step in the below image). Image taken with D7000, handheld, 70mm , f7.1, 1/2500, iso 320, Nikon 70-300 VRii lens. (The image is posted in beta forum of AP in windows. Link posted here)

I tried the following steps: 1. Images 1 and 2 - top portion of scene low and mid exposure. 2. Images 3 and 4 - bottom portion of scene, low and mid exposure, 30% overlap with images 1 and 2. 3. Open as stack 1&2, align perspective only, ungroup stack and store in tif format as individual images. 4. Do the same 3rd step with images 3 and 4. 5. Now make pano using image 1 and 3 to get a low exposure image and save as A in tif. 6. Make pano using image 2 and 4 to get mid exposure image and save as B in tif. 7. Open image A and B as a stack, align using option scale,rotate,translate, then ungroup. 8. On checking the alignment by turning one layer ON and OFF at 600X or so does not show any misalignment. This shows that it is possible to make a final pano out of different sets of exposure bracketed images. If the images are shot with nodal correction brackets/tripod, step 7 may require only perspective option in the stack alignment. Below is a final image exposure blended manually using luminosity masks, intermediate LAB mode usage, USM, clarity . One mid and one high exposure was used as input and aligned as stack, ungrouped, saved as two tif images, then opened the tif images as layers. Regular processing done on layers after this stage.(There is no pano step in the below image). Image taken with D7000, handheld, 70mm , f7.1, 1/2500, iso 320, Nikon 70-300 VRii lens. @Chris B : My system is a normal core I3-4150 CPU, 3.5GHz, 16GB ram, 64bit Win 7, Gigabyte motherboard, home assembled.

I do panos, stacking and ungrouping for subsequent manual blending, focus stacking of more than some 200 images but have not come across such a difficult situation as reported in above threads. I use hugin also for panos,it's good but found AP doing a better and faster job though hugin has more options and alignment related features being specifically for panos work. Editing features are minimal in hugin. Ishall try to do some trials to simulate reported issues and report if problems are noted.

CS6 Two gradient layers, black left and white right. Top layer set to difference blend mode. Compared to AP, this gives symmetrical response and good adjustment range for the tonal width slider.

I checked by having two gradient layers with the top one in difference mode. While changing the filter settings, effect is less for the highlights slider. It can be seen from the mild vertical grey area on the left side of the second image. In the gradient, full white is on the left side.

Camera: D3100 Nikon Lens: Tamron 90mm macro iso 100, f8, 1/125sec, Godox TT600 handheld external flash and X1T-N wireless remote on camera, 1/32 flash power. Camera Handheld. (Left hand flash and right hand camera with left hand fingers supporting camera lens barrel farthest end.) Processing: No settings modified in develop persona. After opening in photo persona, made color adjustments in LAB color space. Back in RGB space, made multiple curves adjustment targeting flower outer petals, inner white petals, greens and bee body. luminosity masks were used for the targeted adjustments. Flattened the layers, took it to LAB, used unsharp mask on lightness channel. Brought back to RGB color space, exported image to jpeg. Image below processed in AP. The second image is without any processing.

@αℓƒяє∂ @John Rostron : Thanks for the feedback on the afmacro extension. Browsed through the flag waving - interesting application !