I've been trying to get those reflections again. My neighbor thought something was wrong with me when she saw me lying in the yard this morning. Then she saw a flash, and told her husband that I was just taking pictures. HAHA. The lite is giving me a fit with the tubes. I can't wait until my cable and bracket is here. This one is a little better?? 6 stacks.


Thats not the one, this is.

Definitely getting there, with focus stacking you should be able to get both the drop and the refraction in clear focus.
Brian v.

I've got Zerene and CombineZ. They seem to make my pc slow down, sometimes locking up. With Photoshop and both those programs, I think I've overloaded my PC. It says I have 80% free space? Every time I try to run Zerene, the thing takes forever. Have any of you guys had this problem with these programs??

PS: I have another PC, a Laptop that has nothing on it. Would I be better off using it for editing only?

Originally Posted by Ambrola I've got Zerene and CombineZ. They seem to make my pc slow down, sometimes locking up. With Photoshop and both those programs, I think I've overloaded my PC. It says I have 80% free space? Every time I try to run Zerene, the thing takes forever. Have any of you guys had this problem with these programs?? PS: I have another PC, a Laptop that has nothing on it. Would I be better off using it for editing only?

Most of these stacking progs will use a lot of memory. Make sure you exit other memory hogs like photoshop before you run them.
Brian v.

Originally Posted by Ambrola I've got Zerene and CombineZ. They seem to make my pc slow down, sometimes locking up. With Photoshop and both those programs, I think I've overloaded my PC. It says I have 80% free space? Every time I try to run Zerene, the thing takes forever. Have any of you guys had this problem with these programs?? PS: I have another PC, a Laptop that has nothing on it. Would I be better off using it for editing only?

- buy more RAM
- adjust virtual memory yourself , rather then let windows do it[ automatic ]
- if you cant buy more RAM and you have vista or win7 , use ReadyBoost , it helps

80% free space is probably just your hard disk drive space. That is the least important value I'm afraid. The thing as mentioned by others is main system RAM. You can find out how much you have by right clicking on "My Computer" or "Computer" and selecting properties. It'll tell you how much you have there.

That aside, nice attempt on the refraction. One thing you need to do is get the flower more defined within the dew drop. Once you have it more defined, then it's all just a case of getting it correctly focussed in the camera. You can get a lot of it in focus by using a smaller aperture but the focus stacking is the real big one in getting it all nice and sharp including the blade of grass as you know.

Thanks for the tip. These are the hardest thing for me. I have to lye on the ground, and we don't have many dew drops right now. I can't see them in the drop? I think its because the drops are so small, or I am getting old and can't see??

make your own drops with a spray-bottle , one that is normally used for plants

agree the second is much better, think you have cropped them a bit too tight in frame.

when shooting them, always make sure you get a sharp outline of the drop so the edge is sharp.

I've got 960mb of ram. Is that low???

I went in the Advanced tab, and selected the option to run at best performance. It changed everything on my screen, but is working 100% faster??

It's all subjective.

If you're running 960Mb RAM, this means you've got 1024Mb and 64Mb of it is being used by an onboard video or sound card.
Further to this, if you're running Windows XP, 1Gb simply isn't enough to do photo processing quickly. If you're running Vista or Windows 7, 1Gb is not enough to run the OS properly let alone do anything else.

If the 64Mb is being used for Video Graphics, this again is very very low. Image processing is very memory intensive.

As I'm also a bit of a gamer, I run Windows 7 with 6GB Triple channel RAM. This is excellent for image processing also but Ideally, I'd say double your RAM, preferably quadruple it for much quicker image processing.

Thanks for the advise. I will get it done.