Masking by focus

[ekbmuts]

It would be super-useful to me to be able to automatically mask an image by sharpness of focus.

I shot a small horse model today.  It's like a kid's toy.  I shot it in parts, meaning, in one shot I'm focusing on the neck, in the next shot I'm focusing on the tail.  But my frame is taking in more than the exact thing I'm focusing on and so some areas of the horse are soft-focus and some are downright out-of-focus.

I was thinking that it would be great to be able to tell Photoscan to mask out the out-of-focus areas and to be able to determine, by using a slider similar to the gradual selection tools, what Photoscan determines as out-of-focus and what it determines as in-focus.  That way you could dial it in.

I think that Photoscan does some filtering automatically (in the background) of out-of-focus areas but I don't know that for a fact.

But as Photoscan generates (or at least calculates) a depth map, it must know what is in-focus and what is out-of-focus already.

Just an idea.

Jon

[Yoann Courtois]

Hi Jon !

As far as you post your message a long time ago, my answer may help others :

Changing the focus of your camera is a really wrong idea because it will change the focal length and so the whole camera calibration.
To get an accurate photogrammetric modeling, you should fix the focus of your whole set of pictures.
Don't hesitate to reduce the aperture (and so extend the shutter speed) so that you will get a longer depth of field and get, in your case, the whole toy in a good focus.

Regards