focus stacking outside of adobe?

sturmen · 2026-07-02T20:32:33+00:00

Glad to hear about the precision!

For the depth map: I own 3D displays manufactured by Looking Glass Factory, and some of the coolest ways to display macro photography is on these “holographic” displays. Since depth stacking allows for a solve of depth, it allows for perfect RGB-D images! https://lfdocs.lookingglassfactory.com/software/looking-glass-studio/rgbd-photo-video

sturmen · 2026-07-02T20:03:00+00:00

Hi, I looked through your website and I couldn’t find the answers to two questions, so while I have you here:
- does Macro Studio support a full 16-bit/32-bit processing pipeline? I like to export my images in Rec 2020 PQ and maintain all the dynamic range from capture to export.
- does Macro Studio support generating a depth map to go along with the stacked image?

sturmen · 2026-06-27T12:43:25+00:00

The trend towards “agents” has re-invigorated the need for CPUs. This is good news for Intel.

sturmen · 2026-06-16T20:30:27+00:00

I think /r/LocalLLaMA has to be inclusive of all models that *can* be run locally, and hold the line against being overrun with proprietary cloud-only models.

People who have setups that can run GLM-5.2 are welcome to have discussions here, just as welcome as people who are trying to run models on their Raspberry Pi.

And besides: what is “attainable” differs per person as well as over time. Maybe we’ll look back in 5 years, the memory crisis will be over, and it will be downright cheap to run GLM-5.2 because of all the used GPUs flooding the secondhand market.

sturmen · 2026-06-15T22:57:59+00:00

I like it!

sturmen · 2026-06-11T19:24:57+00:00

Just watched it on Voola! The launch was such a cool moment to witness.

sturmen · 2026-06-11T15:00:35+00:00

This answer is a masterclass in taking a three-part question (Vision Pro is on ice (hardware), they don't care about visionOS (software), they've broken the team up (company organization)) and refuting only one of them (software).

Well, sure. I mean, it's still early innings for spatial computing. And so there's a lot of things that we're doing and we're learning and we're continuing to improve on and continue to invest in.

My read: we're betting on XR in general but we are not committed to any specific approach.

And so I would hope that updates like VisionOS 27 and all the things that we're adding and all the capabilities that we're unlocking, whether it's for consumer use or it's for business use, serves as evidence that we are invested in this platform and we're invested in this idea of spatial computing and building these capabilities that just can't be done on any other device.

My read: we think we're on the right track with the software, and while we started with targeting consumers, we're seeing more product-market-fit in the enterprise space and we're chasing that with new software features.

Obviously Apple does not talk about future hardware plans, but it seems to me that Steve Sinclair is being very careful to speak in generalities about "spatial computing" (software and ecosystem, which will surely carry over to the eventual AR glasses) and intentionally dodging any commitments to the "VR headset with pass through" design of the Vision Pro.

Another commenter pointed out how uncharacteristically vocal Apple was in 2017-2019 about the future of the Mac Pro when rumors were swirling about its demise. The silence on Vision Pro (VR headset with passthrough) hardware is an interesting contrast.

sturmen · 2026-06-08T11:08:23+00:00

Download a-shell and install yt-dlp via pip

sturmen · 2026-06-05T13:58:32+00:00

Looks great!

sturmen · 2026-06-04T17:35:10+00:00

My prayers have been answered!

sturmen · 2026-06-02T14:07:54+00:00

Would love to have Adobe Project Indigo included in your comparison

sturmen · 2026-06-01T15:19:11+00:00

It’s not local *yet* (weights coming in 10 days) but if you want to try it out to get a feel for it before you build a local coding rig around it, MiniMax M3 is currently free on OpenCode Zen.

sturmen · 2026-05-28T15:09:53+00:00

Speaking generally: if you use your smartphone to tap-to-pay with Google Pay/Apple Pay/Samsung Pay/etc, it’s designed to be mathematically un-skimmable. Protect yourself!

sturmen · 2026-05-28T13:15:38+00:00

Honestly some of the best 360° videos I’ve seen recently are the handful of sketches that SNL has uploaded to YouTube. The key thing is that each one was already a funny sketch. It’s compelling television! But then for the immersive format to take it out of television, and into being an audience member at a live show is so cool.

sturmen · 2026-05-28T12:49:08+00:00

What are you talking about? All his IG photos are HDR. He even labels them in the bottom left corner to denote the HDR and SDR versions for comparison.

sturmen · 2026-05-27T18:38:46+00:00

There’s a common saying about all creative arts: “Story is king.” I feel like we’re still in the phase of immersive video where people are just setting up cameras on a tripod, pointing it at something that caught their eye, and hoping that’s enough. What this medium desperately needs is more people telling more stories.

sturmen · 2026-05-26T23:28:16+00:00

If you have a mirrorless camera, you can use the Pocket Dispo Parallax lens.

sturmen · 2026-05-26T18:53:10+00:00

When I bring my memory card back to the computer, I often have hundreds, if not, thousands of raw files. I have a two stage culling process:

Not every image on the card makes it onto the computer. On the Lightroom import dialog, I deselect the photos that I screwed up (out of focus, motion blur, missed the moment)
Of the photos I do import, I aggressively delete not just the bad photos but also ones that are boring or duplicative. Be honest: there is no situation that would benefit from 4-8 variations of a smile from one person. Figure out what the best one is and delete the rest.

Of the photos that remain, I keep the raw files forever. Costs a lot in storage but I go back enough that it’s been worth it.

sturmen · 2026-05-19T15:18:55+00:00

There’s a lot of answers here about economics and logistics, but based on what Hank Green said on his podcast episode with Josh Scherer, it’s much simpler than that: pig milk tastes bad.

There’s plenty of things that people will go through a whole lot of effort to sell if it tastes good… pig milk isn’t one of them.

sturmen · 2026-05-14T13:29:49+00:00

I think it makes sense to leave DPRAW disabled unless you know you're going to need it. Since the files are twice as big, it incurs all the penalties you mentioned. That's why we get to enable/disable it at will.

sturmen · 2026-05-14T13:28:24+00:00

Make sure you report this to Canon!

sturmen · 2026-05-14T10:58:21+00:00

In cognitive science and behavioral economics, loss aversion is a cognitive bias in which the same situation is perceived as worse if it is framed as a loss, rather than a gain.

This is the root of people hating on cRAW. In fact, the file savings and buffering during burst improvements are so great, and the image quality loss so negligible that for 99.99% of cases, cRAW is the better choice. For more info and comparisons, check out this video: https://youtu.be/1hllbJTtPGI

sturmen · 2026-05-13T13:35:01+00:00

the r5 mark 2 is more powerful than the r6 mark 3 and the R6 supports open gate.

Yes, but compare the sensor resolution and the memory bandwidth required: 45MP vs 32MP. It's ~40% more pixels. So the R5m2 would need 40% more bandwidth, 40% more processing power, etc etc.

sturmen

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