mac focus stacking software for beginners

So this starts with taking photos of flowers outdoors. So I'm gonna come back and show you another technique. But I'm gonna use your question to segue to another technique where you don't, maybe, have that D850 and that software. You focus on the front, and then you say I want 10 shots or 15 shots or 20 shots and then the camera, every time it takes a picture, it automatically goes boop, a little bit father focus, boop, a little bit farther, little farther, little farther. So because I shot this sequence with my D850, I focused on the front and that's where you start out that sequence. When I first took the shot, how did I change the focus point well.įrom front to back. When you, when you first took the shots, like, how did you change the focus point on the flower? So, any questions on that focus stacking approach or method? I sound like a movie, the power of focus stacking. And the more you shoot macro, the more you'll realize the power of focus stacking.

I still have this kind of separation effect, which is fantastic but I was, through image stacking, able to get the depth of field I needed for my subject. So here's the result, and I know it's not like this ooh-ah moment but what we have is really incredible in that the front of the flower to the back of the flower stem is in clear, crystal clear focus and the background is blurry. In this case, I did it before class so I could show you the result. Those are massive files and if you have or 100 images in the stack, it could take forever. You know, shooting with that D850 is like 45 megapixels. So, normally I would hit Okay and depending on your image size, this could take anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes. I'm just gonna pretend that I hit Okay and then show you the result, all right. I'm not gonna hit Okay because it's gonna take a long time to churn through this. I don't do that typically, and then I would hit Okay. You know, after you move all of these things around, sometimes you got these negative spaces with no information in them. So I just pick Stack Images, and sometimes you can choose Content Aware Fill, the transparent errors. Well, I'll say the programmers who wrote Photoshop are really smart people and they understand that what we're doing now is we're doing an image stack versus a panorama merge. So then the next thing that we're gonna do is we go back and we make sure we have all of those, all of those layers selected, so shift click top to bottom and we go Edit, Auto Blend Layers. And I'm not gonna do this, but if I go through and I click off each layer to see the one behind it, you'll see that the flower has been positioned properly in each of those images. Okay, so we wait for the spinning wheel of happiness and now all of those layers are aligned. Auto doesn't always work great, but in this case it does. All the other ones, if you have problems with the alignment, sometimes picking a different alignment method will help but for this example, I already know this because I already checked it out, Auto works great.

And Photoshop is so good that I typically just.Ĭhoose Auto. So over here on the right side, I'm gonna take all of those layers and shift click just like that so all the layers are selected and now I'm going to go up to Edit, Auto Align Layers. Well, this algorithm in Photoshop is so good that it'll actually line up all the pictures so they're perfectly front to back, lined front to back. The flower was actually moving around a little bit. You notice it was windy when I took that shot. You'll see on the right-hand side of Photoshop, it's actually making a layer of each image and what we're going to do is we're going to align those images.

Now it takes those 9 or 12 images, however many I ended up taking, and stacks them into layers on the right-hand side. So I basically just select all of those, I shift click all of those images, I right mouse click, and then I choose Edit In, oops, Edit In, Open as Layers in Photoshop Okay, pow. So follow along with me, my friends, as we do a focus stack example.

Mac focus stacking software for beginners