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For a close-up macro image, if you ever had hard time getting everything in focus then you are in luck – in this tutorial we will explore a technique called “Focus Stacking”
David Bergman shares his experience shooting with focus stacking: “The other day I was playing around with a macro lens shooting close-up images of everything. Macros give you a much shallower depth of field than a regular lens, so you just get a sliver that’s in focus, and everything gets blurrier the further away it is from the focus plane.”
“It’s a cool, but a couple of times I wanted everything in focus, from front to back. One way is to close down my aperture to f/32 and try again, but I found the picture still wasn’t ticky-tack sharp, all the way through.”
“That’s when I remembered a technique called focus stacking, and I’m to tell you it’s super easy to pull off. All you do is shoot multiple overlapping images, with different areas of the image and focus, and then combine them all together in the computer after the fact.”
“There’s a few things you want to make sure to do. Of course you should use a tripod, couple of reasons. First the images all need to be as close to lined up as possible. It’ll just make things easier in post. But more importantly, if you use a low ISO for highest image quality, then your shutter speed might be kind of slow, and you don’t want any camera shake at all.”
“Another thing is that you want to use manual exposure, so your pictures are the same brightness, otherwise it’ll get all funky when you combine them. Lastly I like to use the lenses sweet spot, which is about 2 or 3 stops down from wide open. Most lenses are sharpest right there. So if you’re using a 2.8 lens then you want to be between 5.6 and f/8. Your mileage may vary, but that’s what you should aim for, If sharpness is your goal.”
“So just start on the front, shoot a picture, then change your focus to get the next part in focus, and repeat over and over, until you’ve covered the entire subject in the computer. You can use dedicated software to combine the images, or just do what I do – use Photoshop! Simply put all the images on separate layers in one document, use the ‘Auto Align’ command to make sure everything is lined up, and then go to auto blend layers, and pick stack images.”
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