Saturday, March 28, 2009

Focus stacking


Focus stacking, no I'm not talking about what you get in a Ford garage with a very bad driver, I'm talking about stacking several images together to get a deeper depth of field (more in focus)
This has become popular with macro photographers, enabling them to get all the flower in focus, rather than just the shallow area you'd normally get with a macro lens.
Here I have used it for a landscape type shot (just a test image) the interesting part here is it was shot at F4 on a 50mm lens on a crop sensor camera (equivalent of 75mm lens on 35mm) Theres no way you'd get this depth of field at F4 on that lens.
So hows it done.You take a series of images on a tripod ideally, 3 here, with the focus at different parts of the image, then you combine them to get the sharpest bits from them all. here I have used Photoshops stack layers and blend layers options, but theres other software around, notably CombineZM or Helicon focus. Wayne

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