NYFalls.com Talk

Hi everyone,

Today I attempted focus stacking for the first time. I began shooting this weekend with a macro lens (Canon 100L IS Macro) on my 5D2. I quickly found out that DOF is extremely narrow, even at small aperture / high ISO combinations. In addition, using high aperture (I shot yesterday at f20) takes the lens away from its sweet spot. Combine that with digital noise from ISO2000 and you have a severely degraded image.

I then read about a technique called Focus Stacking. Essentially it's like HDR, but with focus instead of exposure. You take a series of photos, slightly changing focus for each one, and use software to combine them into a tack sharp image.

Further research uncovered Magic Lantern, add-on firmware for Canon DSLR cameras. It runs from the CF card in the camera, and it's free. It adds all sorts of additional functionality to the camera, including focus racking. You tell the camera a start and end point of focus travel, and how many steps to take, and the camera takes the photos. I tested this out in my home light-tent/strobe setup, taking 20 steps of focus of my G-Shock watch.

Here is the start point of focus. Note the short DOF (I shot this at f4.5, ISO100, 1/200):



Here is the end point of focus:



Using Photoshop to auto align and auto blend the 20 individual photos, here is the result:



I know there is an issue with the minute hand, and a ghosted second hand. Ignore that -- I didn't know how to shut down the watch for the photo, so I put it into compass mode but that didn't last long enough for the 20 exposures to be taken.

There is specialty software for both Mac and PC that supposedly does better than Photoshop, I'll try that out and report back in this thread. But Photoshop did a pretty good job. My work flow:

- Shoot in RAW
- Make global changes to all 20 images in Adobe Camera Raw
- Use Adobe Raw Tool Menu to import all 20 images into Photoshop in individual layers
- Auto align
- Auto blend
- Crop (usually there will be an area around the outside that is unusable, an artifact of the macro refocus process which changes object size and orientation)
- Resize
- Export

It certainly doesn't seem practical to try this taking a photo of a fly on a leaf, but believe it or not there are nature photographers who do this! However, most who use focus stacking for macro bugs do it with dead bugs in a controlled environment. So yes, now I'll be looking down as I walk around for dead bugs LOL.

This afternoon I shot a couple small flowers, again using focus stacking to add focus depth. The lotus is 16 images stacked, the white flower is 26 images stacked.

I think you got amazing results! Thoroughly enjoyed reading about the process and really look forward to more! Thanks for taking the time to share it! (I don't see myself having the patience to do all of that!)

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to share one more example of focus stacking. Tonight, I shot 48 (yes, 48) very shallow DOF shots (shot at F4) of a small feather. The feather is about 1 inch long. Using Zerene Stacker the result was a tack sharp feather from front to back. Here are some photos to show the process:

First, here is one slice out of the 48 source photos, shot in RAW and converted to TIFF (Zerene does not work with RAW) - notice the shallow DOF:


Here is a reduced-size shot of the full feather:


Here are a couple of 100% crops from the original combined file:



Andy

Holy moly, Andy. That is awesome. Once you captured the 48 images, about how long would you say the processing to get that final image took?

Hi Kelly. I have an ultra fast new 27" iMac with Fusion drive. Batch converting the RAW to TIFF in Photoshop took a couple minutes. Stacking in Zerene took less than 5 minutes, and it goes by quickly since you can watch each image adding to the final output. I even called my wife in to watch.

I should have set up the software to do fewer steps, but I'm still learning this Magic Lantern firmware add-on for the Canon.

I just did a 7 image stack of my wife's diamond rings. I need to work on proper lighting, and also get a black reflective surface, but here is the test result. Note that I didn't begin the stack near enough to the camera, so the prongs are not in focus:

Fabulous! Can hardly wait for the dead bugs . . .

That worked really well