[bwgv001]

Congratulations to the new camera. I am sure you will not regret. Great camera.

[AfterPentax Mark II]

I'm already scanning with Sigma sd Quattro, but for regular shooting it's not a true all-rounder.

Having P67 with lovely medium format lenses would be a great excuse to have a new adventures with capable digital body such K-3 II surely is. I'm way more intrigued by K-3 II design over KP. Very lovely to hear K-3 II is still relevant for all my needs. Thank you.

Would anyone please recommend budged friendly PK macro lens?

I would be more intrigued by a KP than a K-3 II. The K-3 II is a great camera, but the KP has a number of features borrowed from the K-1. And the KP might not be considered the successor of the K-3 II, but it surely is the replacement of the K-3 II, as it has been the only high-end APS-C from 2018 till the release of the K-3 III, which has seen light of day due to popular demand.
Hope you enjoy the acquired K-3 II. Maybe the Pentax's 50 or 100mm macro?

[MossyRocks]

Which program do you use for stacking?

I use Hugin and it is a mix of the GUI and command line programs that come with it. My general process for stacking non astro shots is:
1. Develop in RawTherapee upscaling by 2x using nearest neighbor method to 16bpc tiffs
2. load the tiffs in the hugin GUI
3. through trial and error find the control point picker and alignment that produces the best results
4. in the GUI do the equalize birghtness option
5. In the output screen have Hugin output remapped aligned files but not actually stitch them
6. Use the hugin_stacker program to combine all the aligned remapped files into one. there are several modes so I will usually combine them multiple ways and pick the best to minimize movement artefacts in the scene, options for combining are average, median, sigma, winsor, min, and max. The sigma, winsor, and median have the outlier rejection capability so they can eliminate ghosting from things moving across the frame from shot to shot.


I do this for very few images as it it time consuming and requires that the shot allow that kind of multiple shots, but for those rare cases where I do need to up the resolution beyond the 24mp of the K-3 it is an option available.

[Kobayashi.K]

I use Hugin and it is a mix of the GUI and command line programs that come with it. .....

Thanks MossyRocks for your recipes. I came across a few programs for stacking but they usually advertise it for focus stacking and it is difficult to judge if it can also be used for super resolution. RawTherapee is already installed on my PC. I'm going to try this method for myself to see what the advantages and disadvantages are.

[MossyRocks]

You can use the Hugin tools for focus stacking as well. There instead of using hugin_stacker to actually combine the images you would use enfuse with the contrast stacking option. Hugin has a somewhat steep learning curve to get the most out of it as you have to use the command line tools instead of just using the GUI so if you try it take the time to learn it. Doing super resolution isn't too difficult and the alignment one gets out of Hugin I find is better than what photoshop produced.

[Kobayashi.K]

You can use the Hugin tools for focus stacking as well. There instead of using hugin_stacker to actually combine the images you would use enfuse with the contrast stacking option. Hugin has a somewhat steep learning curve to get the most out of it as you have to use the command line tools instead of just using the GUI so if you try it take the time to learn it. Doing super resolution isn't too difficult and the alignment one gets out of Hugin I find is better than what photoshop produced.

Hi MossyRocks. Where can I find those Tools?

I tried to understand the hugin_stacker command-line but the Help is so cryptic it's not clear how to use any of these commands. I'm accustomed to using command-line stuff, but this Help isn't helping much.

Another question is where the aligned photos are stored (I'm running Align in Assistant in the simple interface). I would like to try them in Picolay too. During the alignment process a 'Running Assistant' window is shown with the commands that are executed but it closes at the end and I can't copy the contents.

I also can't find back any files in the \AppData\Local\Temp directory (Win 10).

I have also tried Picolay but the alignment doesn't work well, or it can only align photos that have very small deviations. For a test I have shot some hand-held photos in a sequence but perhaps they are not close enough.