AYSGILL FORCE (16/09/10)

Now I'm in a bit of a quandary today. Shall I post what I've got and have you nod off or save some for tomorrow. I’ll go for it. Things didn’t look too promising first thing and the dogs constitutional was a bone chilling ordeal. Not a long one I can assure you. So messages of sympathy really aren’t necessary. As soon as business was done we were back to the van. Fed the two wee beasts and myself then settled down to play with Biros again

This time I had two lots of software to test back to back. The second is CombineZP. I was introduced to this by JOHN AT MIDMARSH JOTTINGS. Though we both hail from Yorkshire originally, he is obviously a touch more careful and therefore a better Yorkshireman than I. CombineZP is free whereas the toy I found to entertain me as the rain belted down yesterday is Helicon 5.1 and  costs well over US$100. To be fair they both have plus and minus points. Combine appears to offer more flexibility but is less intuitive whereas Helicon just gets on with the job. Try both if you are interested, costs nothing to try Helicon for a month. Today I shot a series of eight images of the old green Biro.

      The first……………………

   The last. I’ll not trouble you with the ones in-between. I tried hard to keep the focal range even between shots.

   This is Helicon’s result and appears nigh on perfect.

  This is a series of the same shots combined using CombineZP there has been a peculiar alignment issue at the top. This could be my fault. There is also a colour cast this may be down to my converting the images to jpeg. Helicon just accepted the RAW files and got on with it. I also tried Helicon on an egg thinking, rightly as it happens, eggs curve gradually and don’t have that much texture for the algorithm to latch on to.

     An odd result, superbly sharp on the left but not so good on the right. Vertically I can detect no problems. There is a strange colour shift which the programme, without prompting advised me was my fault, could well be. Anyone who can write software just has to be right but I did try and keep the light constant. Promise!

This is getting out of hand but as I’m thinking of a microscope from Santa, thought I’d start covering the options. The options will be cheap…I hope!! Of course I’m hoping for Santa’s sake………make little difference to me.

I have changed my mind, finish this post then I’ll be back with a saner head on to pass on the pictures from Aysgill Force and our walk. I will call it Aysgill Force Two. That took some working out.

See you in a while.