Hello i'm Graham Houghtonand welcome to today's video now in this video i'm going to show you an
alternative way of capturing images to use in focus stacking programs traditionally you use
a still image camera and you will take a number of images from the front of the subject to the
back of the subject then you put those into a focus stacking program like helicon soft or
photoshop or affinity photo and make one composite image from all of those images
in today's video i'm going to show you how you can do that very simply using 4k video now the process
of using still images if you've got a lot of slices could take you maybe 15 minutes to create
that up that's a complete sequence using 4k video you can complete that in just under two seconds so
you'll get the same amount of resolution and i can show you that in this video
so the idea is to use a motorised slider and the one i'm going to use today is the myops slider
plus i did a review of that and i'll put a link to that in the video description below if you wanted
to look at the full review for the product so i'm going to use my canon eos m6 mark ii
with the seven artisans 60 millimetre f 2.8 macro lens but you could use this with a 50mm lens and
extension tubes if you wanted to get close-ups such as i've got on the table here got a bit of an
additional light to give me the correct exposure for the video so the process is the camera will
advance it starts recording before you get to the leading edge of your subject will advance through
the subject recording video all the time and when it's got to the back of the subject it will
stop recording the myops mobile app is an ideal solution for that and that is why i've chosen this
uh particular review now on the desktop you can see the complete setup i have so we've got the
my up slider uh you can see that i've got a scale on there gives me an indication of just how much
travel i'm getting so i can match that to the travel of the subject my additional light source
and here we've got the subject with this little doll and from the front of the subject to the back
of the subject is about four centimetres so that's the amount of travel we need to put in the slider
here is the smartphone running the MIOPS app so let me take you through the complete setup
for this pro process so we started the app and the camera is connected
so it's connected um via bluetooth to the device um making sure my lead is plugged into the bath
camera for the remote control which is from the slider plus capsule and it triggers the EOS m6
via that 2.5 millimetre Canon connection so the first thing i want to do is to actually go into
focus stacking and if we look at the app that is the bottom left-hand tile so if i tap that
it takes us into the focus stacking uh program and we need to be setting up our point a which will be
the closest point of the uh setup so by setting point a to the front and setting point b to the
back we have enough travel to create our video for this sequence so let's go back to the app
and we'll go to the center portion which is mark slider tap that and you can see it's set your a
position so i'm going to move the slider to the left which will then take the focus from the
back of the image to the front of the image and i want to set it roughly uh on the front of the
elbow of the model so let me switch to a camera view and i'm going to move the slider using the
app and you can probably see i've got the left and the right but across the top of the app
you've got the pads which will allow me to change the position the default is 1.14 micron per step
if it's used times 10 that's 11 microns times 100 is 114 and if you change tap the 1000 you're
moving at roughly one millimetre per step so that's great for when you want to get close to
it and you want to get the finest point so i'm going to use the left hand right hand slider
control here so let's go back to the camera and i want to move the camera to the left so i'm going
to slide that slider to the left and the carriage will start to move back if i give you the overhead
view you can see this happening so i'm going to move it back like so and i want to look at the
front edge of that image you can see that it's fairly sharp there i'm just going to take it a
little bit further to the left so that front leading edge just goes out of focus so i know
that i'm in front of it and then the leading edge will be captured for the video sequence
so that's just gone out of focus so with the app i now click the orange tick on the right hand side
and that locks position a now we want to set position b again by just tapping the b on the app
and it's going to move the camera forward
and that will be to our last non-b position which is obviously too far for this so
we're going to move to the left for position b so again let's look at the camera and you can see
it's way behind it's focused on the background so i'm going to move the camera to the left
and we'll look at the image you can see the back of the arm is just in focus so let's
just traverse to the right and see if we push them out of focus
right so that is behind the subject so i'm going to click the
tick on the right hand side which locks position b
so block position b now if we tap position a it will drive the carriage to the left-hand side
you can see it's moved the courage to just in front of the elbow which is what we want
now we need to look at the amount of movement so clicking the
arrow at the top of the app to take us back to the home screen the total
movement if we look into the center of the slider position there is 5.0 centimeters
so the carriage will move five centimeters but the movement per frame is we want to set
is at the bottom there 5.024 so the total movement is 5.04 and the movement we've got is 5.02 so
providing that bottom movement is less than the total movement we will get two frames
if it's more you'll get one frame and this process won't work so providing you are very close to your
total movement and providing your app is showing you two frames in total
then this process will work with the overhead view showing i'm going to click the tick icon
which will start the process running the camera will move back to the a position
and then we'll start the video recording and then it will run to the b position and
stop recording and then we'll see this from the camera perspective so let me just hit the tick
so the camera is moving to the b position and during that process it's starting to record
and now it's ended up at position b if i click the tick the camera will move back to the a position
and start recording again so click the tick so it's going back to the a position
and now we'll start recording um start to accelerate towards the b
position when it's reached a b position it will stop recording
let me show you that from an overhead perspective and you can see the lcd screen
on the camera obviously with hdmi connected you can't see the lcd screen so let me just
take that out and reposition the camera for you
so now you can see the lcd screen and you should be able to see the record button
start when we get back to position a so again i'll start the app running by clicking the tick
the camera will go back to position a you'll see the recording start it will move to position b
and then you'll see this recording stop so let me start the process so it's going back to position a
starts recording towards position b
gets to position b and then stops recording so you can see we've completely covered the subject
it's gone from position a to position b which was the front to the back of the subject to
give us our roughly two seconds with a video we will have say 100 frames or 200 frames
here i'm using 25 frames per second so two seconds of video gives me roughly
200 frames in helicon soft that if you import that video into halogen soft it converts those
images into tiff files and then you can select if you like the start and end point if you're
ahead or behind the subject to reduce the number of images that need to be stacked but
it will sort that out itself so i prefer helicon soft even though it's quite an expensive program
so that's how you create an mp4 video file to use for focus stacking obviously with the my slider
plus the increment per step is 1.014 microns so you can see the very very fine increments
you can get if you've got a higher magnification with a bellows and a microscope objective with
the times for magnification then you can get some very very fine increments to photograph
uh insect eyes and heads and that sort of thing and i'll show you that in a later video
so the first thing we're going to do is to import that video file into our editing program here i'm
using helicon soft so file import video file you can see that it now then goes through that
video file and looks for each frame and converts it into a tiff file once you click the render
button at the bottom right hand side of the screen there you'll see that it now builds up
a bit depth map of the each of the frames and then finally it will composite those into one frame
you can see the process there you can see it's building up the map
to arrive at a final composite so there we have the final composite click on the uh saving
rename the file select where you want to save it and then just click save and it will save that
file in a jpeg format with the location that you selected click the save button
and it will save it as a jpeg with the quality specified by you
and here is the output file from that stacking process
well that's it for the video hope you did find that useful do check out my review of this slider
plus it's in the video description below you find how to use this and more applications that you can
get running on the myops mobile app so until the next video as usual thanks very much for watching
please do take care and i hope to see you all very very soon goodbye for now