Can stacking multiple shots make a soft 500mm mirror-lens image sharper?

Asked 4/30/2018

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I’m using a 500mm f/8 mirror lens that is very light and inexpensive, but its images are soft and manual focus is difficult. My camera can shoot 12 fps. I know focus stacking is used to extend depth of field, and I’ve also heard of multi-shot “super-resolution” techniques that combine several frames. In theory, can multiple exposures of nearly the same scene be combined to recover more detail or reduce blur from a lens with poor resolving power? In practice, are there any useful methods for making an optically soft image sharper by stacking frames?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

8y ago

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In focus stacking, one tries to only use the in-focus areas of every picture to generate a larger depth of field. Think of it as multiple pictures above each other with masks, and only the in-focus areas are opaque.

When referring to super-resolution, we usually talk about eliminating noise or doing very slight sensor shifts, therefore getting a higher SNR and/or higher pixel count.

Both techniques assume that one starts with decent pictures. Technology cannot make up information that simply is not there. Super-resolution needs spot-on photos to work, as does focus stacking. Having 200 shots of the milky way that are all way out of focus will not help you to get one very clear one, as the absence of information between the different shots will always be the same (circa).

Another example to get the idea of what is possible would be exposure stacking / HDR - you can get an HDRI out of an underexposed + a properly exposed + an overexposed picture, but take three equally overexposed pictures, and your "HDRI" would hardly differ from one of the original pictures. It is the same with focus.


Disclaimer: The following paragraph is only true if all your photos look like the one you have uploaded here. If focus varies, then technically, it would qualify as focus stacking to me.

The shown picture does not offer much in terms of differentiation e.g. between feathers - and since all of the photos will most probably lack this because it is not the noise of the sensor, but the lens's lack of resolution/sharpness, no software can accurately add this information. In theory, it would be possible to create a software that would add some feather-like texture to any out-of-focus bird, but I would not think that many people would be interested in it, as results would be horrible anyways. You might be able to get the eye a tad sharper if the bird moved around a bit, but that would count as focus-stacking (IMHO). If the main issue is resolution/sharpness of the lens, and not the focus (as it is in the sample image), then you could, in theory, get better results when panning/tilting the lens a bit, as it perhaps has a sweet spot for sharpness and you could get some details there. Again, this does not differ much from doing focus-stacking.

Originally by user69369. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user69369

8y ago

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Usually, no. Focus stacking will not help here: it works by combining the in-focus parts of different images to increase depth of field, but if none of the frames contains truly sharp detail, there’s nothing better to combine.

Multi-shot super-resolution is a different technique. In principle, multiple well-aligned frames with tiny sub-pixel shifts can improve sampling, reduce noise, and sometimes increase apparent resolution. But it still depends on the source frames containing real detail. If the lens is the limiting factor and each image is already blurred by poor optics or missed focus, stacking cannot recreate information that was never recorded.

In practice, you may get modest improvement only when combining many high-quality frames and using sharpening/deconvolution along with the stack. Even then, there is always a trade-off between noise and resolution, and the gains are limited if the lens is fundamentally soft.

So for a soft 500mm mirror lens, stacking is unlikely to turn it into a sharp lens. Your best options are careful focusing, post-processing for mild sharpening, or using better optics.

UniqueBot

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8y ago

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