Helicon Focus is a proprietary

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

 commercial

Commerce

While business refers to the value-creating activities of an organization for profit, commerce means the whole system of an economy that constitutes an environment for business. The system includes legal, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological systems that are in operation in any...

 digital image processing tool, first released in 2003, developed and published by Helicon Soft Limited. Like programs such as CombineZM

CombineZM

CombineZM is an open source image processing software package for creating extended depth of field images. It runs on Windows XP and 2000. CombineZM is based on CombineZ5, a program which runs on older versions of Windows and is no longer maintained...

, Helicon Focus is designed to blend the focused areas of several partially focused digital photographs

Digital photography

Digital photography is a form of photography that uses an array of light sensitive sensors to capture the image focused by the lens, as opposed to an exposure on light sensitive film...

 to increase the depth of field

Depth of field

In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image...

 (DOF) possible in an image.

Overview

Helicon Focus can be used to increase DOF in any situation, though its primary uses are in macro photography

Macro photography

Macrophotography is close-up photography, usually of very small subjects. Classically a macrophotograph is one in which the size of the subject on the negative is greater than life size. However in modern use it refers to a finished photograph of a subject at greater than life size...

, landscape photography

Landscape photography

Landscape photography is a genre intended to show different spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. This popular style of photography is practiced by professionals and amateurs alike. Photographs typically capture the presence of nature and are often free...

 and photo-microscopy. In macro photography, the DOF is often very small. To increase it, Helicon Focus is capable of merging several differently focused images together to create one image where the subject is entirely in focus. In landscape photography, where the entire frame is often preferred to be in focus (such as distant clouds and an object of interest in the foreground), Focus can be used to blend photos together to create a desired result.

Features

• Automatic adjustments during stacking
• "Dust map" for removing black points from the resulting images
• Supports most common file types, including RAW, TIFF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, and BMP
• Can add text and a scale bar
• 3D stack visualization and Wavefront .obj export
• (In Pro) Retouch brushes to manually brush in any focused (or unfocused) areas that weren't merged properly
• (In Pro) Create panoramas
• Create image stack animations
• Batch processing

External links

• Helicon Focus Homepage
• Helicon Soft Ltd.
• Focus stacking Pictures and technic.
• d-Studio Ltd.
• Version for Mac OS X
• Outback Photo review of Helicon Focus 3.00 and CombineZ5