Tag: focus stacking

Focus Stacking in Joshua Tree National Park

As part of the Desert Institute class I was teaching in Joshua Tree National Park, we did a sunset at the end of the second day at the trailhead parking log for Ryan Mountain.  Across the road one of the participants found a composition that I liked a lot, so we talked about the possibilities.  He ended up with a nice photograph and moved on.  I spent a little more time on it because I saw that there was a depth of field problem that needed to be resolved.

The foreground was about 20 feet from the camera and the background was a least a quarter of a mile away.  At a focal length of 190 mm there was no way I could get that depth of field even with an aperture of f/32.  So, as you can see below, I did two shots, one focused on the bush in the foreground and the second focused on the outcrops in the background.  The plan was to use focus stacking to get a sharp image throughout.

Photoshop does an excellent job of focus stacking.  To get it started, I selected the two files in Lightroom and clicked Open as Layers in Photoshop… from the Photo menu.

Lightroom converts the DNG files to Tiffs and loads them into Photoshop where they are stacked as two layers, one on top of the other.

In Photoshop, select both layers and in the Edit menu first click Auto-Align Layers… and then Auto-Blend Layers…. It’s that easy.

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Focus Stacking – First Impressions

A practical guide to focus stacking

Background

Depth of Field (DOF) is a staple of near-far landscape photography.  It is used when the composition contains object that are very near to the lens as well as objects that are distant.  Traditionally, it has been achieved by using a wide-angle lens with a small aperture or a tilt-shift lens.  Using this technique, it is possible to have the nearest object one or two feet from the lens and everything is in focus from the object to infinity. 

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Depth of field example. The rock is 18″ from the lens but with a wide focal length (16 mm) and a stopped down aperture (f/11) everything is in focus.

The disadvantage of this method is you must use a wide-angle or tilt-shift lens, preferably on a full-frame sensor camera body, and a small aperture.  (In this image, the rock was 18” from the lens.  I used a 16mm lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor and was able to get the needed DOF at f/11.). But small apertures introduce lens diffraction which work against you by softening the entire image.  And what if you don’t have a wide enough lens.  You couldn’t get this shot with a 24mm lens.  And getting any kind of DOF with a telephoto lens is virtually impossible, even with fairly distant subjects.

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