Panasonic Post Focus and Olympus Firmware Updates (ePhotozine).
Rejoice, Olympus E-M1 shooters… in-camera focus stacking is here! (via the new firmware v4.0) at Imaging Resource.
Voigtlander APO Lanthar, Part 2: a 4K video sample (Annie Barton on Youtube).
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ40 Review (Photographyblog).
Panasonic Lumix GX8 im Test: Erst knipsen, dann schärfen (Der Spiegel).
Jurek: “When Panasonic released their V-Log L update for the GH4, “Sturm und Drang” erupted on all sides, with doom laden accounts of the demise of an electronics manufacturing giant. It was a failure, people cried rip off. For me, it’s the opposite. Having spent a little time experimenting, I’m excited by the prospects this feature brings to the GH4’s image making process. Hope you enjoy. https://vimeo.com/147546148“
6 Responses
OM stacking works only with 60mm macro and 2.8 Pro zooms, or did I hear right on the video?
Focus Stacking (in-body, 8 frames) works with 60mm Macro, 12-40mm PRO and 40-150mm PRO.
Focus Bracketing (takes up to 999 frames, stack at computer) works with any m4/3 lens that has AF motor.
Legacy 4/3 lenses or any adapted lens ain’t supported.
With Olympus Focus Stacking (in-body) while the RAW output is impossible, you get to keep all 8 frames to do it in post. And if you have camera in RAW+JPEG then you get 8 RAW and 9 JPEG (9th the stacked) and you can use RAW at computer for stacking.
Yep! Best of all, it’s free!
The Olympus Focus Bracketing and Focus Stacking is for serious photographers.
The Panasonic Post Focus is meant for sloppy people who just wants to get fast situation captured and then choose later on what frame to pull to get wanted composition, great example when going in group trips where you can’t stop than for a second as rest of the group moves forward.
Olympus Focus Bracketing works for same manner that you can just let the camera shoot example 15-20 frames and then you just pick the wanted frame and delete others. You just don’t get the fancy movie playback or “touch to choose focus frame” feature. But you have 16Mpix JPEG/RAW instead 8Mpix JPEG with 50% compression value.
The reason why E-M1 has the Focus Stacking, and any other OM-D have it, is that E-M1 has so huge RAM that was required to stack the 8 frames. E-M5 II would had got it if it would as well had as big RAM but it didn’t. And GH4 doesn’t either have so big RAM so it can’t either get it. The E-M1 has biggest RAM from any camera (including every Canon and Nikon DSLR) but its weakness is so slow I/O bus for card reader, limiting only to 33MiB/s writing speed. So you can guess that what happens when E-M1 fills 41 frames of RAW, each being about 17-19MiB size under 4 seconds, and then it starts writing it to SD card with 33MiB/s speed, yes it is the bottle neck.
Under 4 seconds (remember, E-M1 is capable to 11 frames per second sequential shooting) E-M1 captures over 700MiB worth of data. And it takes about 21 seconds to write all that to SD card.
Or E-M1 can capture all those 8 frames for focus stacking as RAW, expand all the frames for contrast separation masking and then combine all to single frame and write result to card, same time as it is writing all the 8 frames to card at background.
I guess what I hate most apart from… not really needing this feature.. is the way I’m penalised for being an early adopter and owning a GH4 and GX7 instead of the G7 and GX8