@Butch: Huh, that sounds interesting. I never even considered the option of stacking stacks, lol. And, in Photoshop anyway (dunno about Helicon), you can go through and edit the masks on each layer to compensate for little things, sometimes bigger things like halos if you're somewhat experienced with Photoshop, but bigger things are probably more effort than they're worth. I dove into the masks on a couple and quickly got lost in them. It's kind of a weird concept to wrap your head around. And I've got around a decade of Photoshop experience. 
@Brie: Graci. They were all done in Photoshop. Camera was on manual, so exposure and everything stayed the same. The idea to make sure it's well exposed is something I'll try out today. I'll even try overexposing it (not so much that it blows anything out, obviously, just enough to be like "huh, that doesn't look right," lol) and adjusting for that in Photoshop.
One thing I should also note: I had a picture of just one of the flowers against the black background, and it REALLY didn't like that. It wouldn't even process it. Apparently because more than 60% of the image was black, Photoshop got all huffy about it. Said something about at least 40% of the image being something it can see, or else it can't decide where to auto-align. LOL.
Whatevs, silly technology. I'm not sure, but I would venture to guess that the technology to digitally automatically stack images is fairly new, so hopefully things get better in the next few years. There's a lot of potential, for sure. But even the images that are coming out as pretty good for me are still not quite right. They seem to lose some clarity along the way. Which I can't exactly blame Photoshop for, that's GOT to be a ridiculously complex process.
@Brie: Graci. They were all done in Photoshop. Camera was on manual, so exposure and everything stayed the same. The idea to make sure it's well exposed is something I'll try out today. I'll even try overexposing it (not so much that it blows anything out, obviously, just enough to be like "huh, that doesn't look right," lol) and adjusting for that in Photoshop.
One thing I should also note: I had a picture of just one of the flowers against the black background, and it REALLY didn't like that. It wouldn't even process it. Apparently because more than 60% of the image was black, Photoshop got all huffy about it. Said something about at least 40% of the image being something it can see, or else it can't decide where to auto-align. LOL.
Whatevs, silly technology. I'm not sure, but I would venture to guess that the technology to digitally automatically stack images is fairly new, so hopefully things get better in the next few years. There's a lot of potential, for sure. But even the images that are coming out as pretty good for me are still not quite right. They seem to lose some clarity along the way. Which I can't exactly blame Photoshop for, that's GOT to be a ridiculously complex process.
