I’ve written about Focus stacking before but set with the challenge of doing some macro shots for our local u3a Practical Photography group I thought it a good idea to revisit the technique and refresh my memory at the same time.
First it is important to remember a few things about taking the shots – before you get to any post-processing. You can stack photos from handheld camera images as the shots from the Vale of Rheidol post demonstrates, or you may have a focus-stacking feature in your camera, but if not …
- first you need to consider using a tripod; it is possible without, but you’ll find it difficult without one;
- you need to put your camera into manual mode so that the ISO, aperture and shutter speed settings don’t change between shots;
- you possibly need to remember to switch off image stabilisation in the camera (or lens), but this is not thought to be as important as it was when the first digital cameras were introduced;
- you almost certainly need to either use a remote control to take the shot, or to change the shutter to have a delay of say 2secs – this will remove nearly all possibilities for camera shake save the need to need to weigh your tripod down in a strong wind;
- take your shots – as few as two, as many as ??? (your choice);
- import the photos into Lightroom; select one and do any edits you want to do to it that will be applied to the others, ie white balance, spot removal, global edits for texture, clarity, shadows and highlights and then select the other shots in the sequence and synchronise them to apply the changes to all the shots;
- select the ones you want to stack and then choose Photo > Edit > Open as Layers in Photoshop from the menu bar;
- Photoshop will automatically open and then select the layers (the images) in the Layers panel;
- choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers from the menu bar, making sure that you’ve selected the Auto checkbox in the dialog before pressing OK;
- then select all layers in the group, and choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers from the menu bar making sure you’ve selected Stack Images in the dialog box and checked the other two checkboxes as well;
- now you have a new focus-stacked image which you should save back to Lightroom which you can do by choosing Edit > Save As … from the menu bar, remembering to save the image as a 8-bit flattened TIFF to reduce the filesize;
- Lastly in LrC, I chose Library > Convert photo to DNG … [remembering to uncheck “Only convert Raw files”, and probably check “Delete originals after successful conversion” (again to save space)].
[The above text was copied from the two earlier posts]
You can then do further edits on the DNG file that you have created.
Some galleries of the three subjects chosen (no post-processing other than focus stacking in Photoshop) …
90mm F2.8 Macro; ISO 2500 @ 1/125sec
90mm F4 Macro; ISO 400 @ 1/10sec
90mm F2.8 Macro; ISO 3200 @ 1/100sec
These are by no means perfect. My excuse is that I was having extreme problems with my 90mm F2.8 Macro Lens. I’d slightly overdone the superglue when fixing the MF/AF indicator ring on the body of the camera in the morning when I discovered it was loose. The second-value of the lens is less than it was – but it still functioned well, once fixed!
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