From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Focus stack processing

From the course: The Practicing Photographer

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Focus stack processing

“

- [Instructor] Last week on "The Practicing Photographer," you saw me take this picture of a flower. I had a Fuji XT5 with a hundred millimeter macro lens on it, and I took this picture. And as you would expect with macro distances, I've got a depth of field problem. This is out of focus. This stuff's out of focus. That's not always going to be a problem. Sometimes a flower looks nice with shallow depth of field. In this case, I wanted the whole thing in focus though. And even at F16, I was unable to get that. And so last week you saw me use the focus bracketing feature on that Fuji XT5 to shoot a series of about 80 images each focused to a different point along the flower's depth with the idea that I would take that stack of images and merge them. And that's what we're going to look at this week on "The Practicing Photographer." Photoshop has a focus stacking merging feature built into it, and I used that to merge my 80 odd images into this. This has deeper depth of field. Look, this is now in focus. This is in focus. Here's the original. Keep your eye on this bit right here. As I switch back to here, the reason it's appearing to get larger is that this has had a small crop that was necessary because of the merging process. The thing about this Photoshop stacked image though is it's not perfect. There's a blurry bit down here and down here. There's another one over here. There's a weird thing where this is in focus and this is blurred, but the most egregious kind of mistake is this area in here. This is all soft, and I just don't like that. I don't think it's super obnoxious. It looks like it maybe is just a soft part of the flower, but it really should be in focus. Nevertheless, for a free, not free, but for a photo stacking feature that you may already have, this has done a very good job and it's not always going to make this mistake. However, there is dedicated focus stacking software, and probably the best option in that regard is an application called Helicon Focus. If you go to heliconsoft.com, you will find Helicon and there are other products you can download a 30 day fully functional demo from them. I took Helicon focus and merged and got this, so this is completely different. It's got some tonal problems that need to be corrected, but we can fix that. But look at this. This is all in focus. This is all in focus. Now, when we go back to the original and then go to here, we really see the difference. Again, the color correction that can happen later. I just want you to really pay attention. That focus stacking and in-camera focus stacking really does work. This is a tool that you may have in a camera you've already got. Sometimes it's referred to as focus stacking. Sometimes it's focused bracketing. Sometimes it's called focus shift. A lot of cameras offer this. You can also buy dedicated robots like this stack shot that will take care of moving your camera forward while it shoots, so that you can shoot focused stacks. If you'd like to know how to use Photoshop to stack images, and if you'd like to know more about macro in general, check out my macro course here in the library.

Contents