The other day, I found a Long horned beetle clinging to the siding of my house. I grabbed my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens and my Feisol tripod. As I could not get all the parts of this beetle in focus I remembered the auto-align and auto-blend trick I had seen in the new Adobe Photoshop CS4. Previously I had tried focus stacking using freeware combinez5 which produced fantastic results. On the web I could get quite a few video tutorials like this and this, explaining their technique but there was dearth of written tutorials with pictures. Probably it is easier nowadays to create a video tutorial and post. So here is my humble effort to show you how I did this. I recommend that you download the latest update of Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 which updates and improves the quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers.

I shot this beetle which was sitting on a white dining mat. As the depth field at 1:1 macro setting was too shallow. I took 10 sequential shots maintaining same exposure settings on a tripod but just altering the point of focus little by little. I usually start from the nearest point which I try to be in sharp focus then try little further until I reach the last shot which has the farthest point in focus. Best method to do this is fix the focus on the lens and move the camera little by little forward and keep taking pictures of different focus points. This avoids the geometric distortion all together. Make sure while doing so you make sure that the exposure, speed as well as focus all are locked. This needs a real steady hand or a focusing rail connected to the tripod head.

If you don’t have them then you can try getting the shots by fixing the camera on the tripod and altering focus of the lens by adjusting manual focus ring. Auto focus is a big NO for this technique. Now with Adobe Photoshop CS4 you can easily correct the geometric distortion introduced by adjusting manual focus.

Export from Lightroom to Layers in Photoshop

My work flow involves Adobe Lightroom 2.3 which manages all my files on my hard disk. Once you import the files from your card, select all the files which need to be blended and choose the option of edit in > Open as Layers in Photoshop. The step is same if you are using Bridge instead of Lightroom. Now Lightroom exports all the files to Photoshop into a single Photoshop document with multiple layers. Each layer consists of a single image. Here I have 10 images of this beetle consisting of various areas of  sharp focus resulting in 10 layers in the Photoshop document.

Select All Layers in Photoshop

In Photoshop choose Select > All Layers.

Choose Auto-Align Layers

Then choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers. The Auto-Align Layers dialog box opens.

Auto-Align Layer Dialog Box

Note: The Auto-Align Layers dialog box has a default Lens Correction setting of Geometric Distortion. This setting gives you the option of compensating for geometric distortion. In addition, the default Projection setting is Auto. When Auto is selected, Photoshop finds and compensates for certain kinds of lenses based on meta data information.

After Auto-Aligning Layers

Now click OK to view the Auto-Aligned composition. Now all the images are perfectly aligned. You might notice the edges of the picture seems warped this is because Adobe Photoshop has now corrected the geometric distortion.

Auto-Blend Layers

With all Layers still selected choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.

Auto-Blend Layers Dialog Box

Select Stack Images from the Auto-Blend dialog box. Leave Seamless Tones And Colors selected.
Click OK.

If we had not done auto-align before doing the auto-blend then the geometric distortion would be there in these images. And that gives a strange halo effect near the edge of the beetle. So it is always advisable to run auto-align before auto-blend.

Auto-Blend Layers Progress

When you turn on the layers, you can see that the images now contain deep focus with all the points in focus.

Cropping in Photoshop

Now its time to crop the edge so that main image looks clean. It also gets rid of the warped edges. Now its time to save the image and get back to Adobe Lightroom to further process if necessary. I found many a times the resulting image needs some exposure correction which can be easily done in Adobe Lightroom. Now here is the final image as exported from Adobe Lightroom.

Hope this tutorial was helpful, please ask me any steps if you have found difficult to follow. Please enter your valuable comments so that I can improve on my tutorial.

Oriental Honey Buzzard

Oriental Honey Buzzard (Pernis ptilorhyncus) sub adult male. also known as Oriental Honey-buzzard and Crested Honey Buzzard. Despite its name, this species is not related to Buzzards, and is taxonomically closer to the kites.

The head lacks a strong supraciliary ridge giving it a very un-raptor-like facial appearance. It has a long tail and a short head crest. It is brown above, but not as dark as Honey Buzzard, and paler below. There is a dark throat stripe. Unusually for a large bird of prey, the sexes can be distinguished. The male has a blue-grey head, while the female’s head is brown. She is slightly larger and darker than the male. The male has a black tail with a white band, whilst the female resembles female Honey Buzzard. It breeds in Asia from central Siberia east to Japan. It is a summer migrant to Siberia, wintering in tropical south east Asia. Elsewhere it is more-or-less resident. It is a specialist feeder, living mainly on the larvae and nests of wasps, although it will take other small prey.

The Oriental Honey Buzzard breeds in woodland, and is inconspicuous except in the spring, when the mating display includes wing-clapping. The display of roller-coasting in flight and fluttering wings at the peak of the ascent are characteristic of the genus Pernis.

Thanks to Shiva for helping me to identify.

Sidux looks like the best Debian sid-based live CD now out there. With Kanotix development staggerring over last few months, Sidux offers a clean, easy hard disk install and a fast release cycle.

It’s a distribution that impressed me before I’ve even tried it. While I was downloading the new release I checked the forums, and found they were practically exploding with activity. That indicates a high level of popularity for a distribution that is only a few months old.

Since there is so much in common with Debian, why choose sidux over pure Debian? The answer is ease of use. The installation is much easier, and the hardware detection is excellent. I’m a big fan of Debian, but its installer doesn’t match the user-friendliness and quick setup that sidux offers. Wireless support of sidux is its strong point, and it makes a good laptop distribution.

With sidux you get more than an up-to-date, easy-to-use system, however. Although it is not officially supported, many sidux users have enjoyed Beryl and now Compiz on sidux. If a 3-D desktop isn’t your style, you still have plenty of customized artwork to choose from to make your sidux box look spiffy.

Sidux is cutting-edge software, so you can probably expect to run into a few problems. That is the price you pay for having constant upgrades as soon as possible. Yet sidux is easy to use, fast, and for the most part it just works. It is more true to the Debian way than Ubuntu is, and it retains compatibility with Debian where Ubuntu does not. There is an active community to provide support, and the documentation is available in many languages. All around, sidux is an excellent distribution.

Here is a nice review of Sidux 2007-03 posted at Linuxseekers

If you recall in my earlier post I was in search of a good operating system to replace windows. In these 20 days I tried several versions of Linux.

• SLAX was fantastic distro using Slackware as a source. It uses modules which help you to simplify the installation of programs. live scripts it uses is simply awesome. SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. Only reason I couldn’t use it on my machine as my main OS was that it was based on 32bit. So it could just see 2GB of my 4GB of RAM.
• Ubuntu was another distro I played around. The Gnome interface was very spartan and was not much to my liking. The Ubuntu community is very enthusiastic. But the speed of Ubuntu was not upto what I expected.
• Kubuntu is KDE variant of Ubuntu also did not enthuse me a lot. Both these were slower than my expectation.
• Sabayaon Linux is a gentoo based Live DVD. I downloaded newest version 3.4a. it installed fine. A very nice arty interafce, but several programs were broken in the so called stable release. Portato which was used to emerge new packages was broken. I like the interface as well as the speed. I tried installing VMWARE workstation 6.0 on the Sabayon Linux as I wanted to run Windows along with Sabayon. It failed miserably to install despite all the tricks I could get from the Sabayon Forum. It is a worthy Distro but for some broken softwares. As I am writing this I saw new version which is released called 3.4e. I hope that solved these quirks. i gave up after struggling for over 3 days.
• Finally I realized a fantastic distro which serves my purpose in Sidux. It is based on Debian’s unstable branch called ’sid’. It was in 64 bit, it had the latest and most modern softwares, it had a fantstic manual, superb hardware detection and drivers, latest kernel. This finally was the OS of my choice.

I will talk in details about Sidux in my next blog. Until then happy surfing

About a year since Flash 9 was released for Windows and Mac, Linux desktop users can finally… use MySpace… well, there’s lots of benefits in Flash 9. Even if you don’t care for MySpace or YouTube or virtually any decent video site these days, a version of Flash hasn’t been released for Linux since 7.0 and most would argue the last “stable” version was probably Flash 6.

Go get it!