Focus Stacking
Here’s another example of focus stacking using a small subject at a very close distance. For these images I was about 6 inches from the flower and using a 40mm micro lens. My exposure was f/8, 1/50 sec., ISO 64.
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I used 6 images stacked together. Here’s 2 of them. You can see that when you are trying to focus that close, you get either the front part of the flowers in focus or the back part. In order to get everything in focus in one shot you would have to set your aperture to f/16 or f/22 and back up from the subject to at least three feet. You could use a telephoto lens but that would “foreshorten” everything in the image and make the flowers look mushed together. That will be in another blog post.
Focus stacking takes a little bit of extra work in Photoshop but the program does most of the work for you. Here’s the final images together:
I edited the two images in Adobe Camera Raw then clicked “Done” when I was happy with the images. Then I went into Photoshop and clicked on File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack. I checked the box for Photoshop to attempt to auto-align the images.
Once the images are loaded into Photoshop, click Edit > Auto Blend Layers and Photoshop will do the masking for you.
Once the masking is finished, you can crop the image or use Content Aware Fill.
