Gene51 wrote:
Some photographers will use stacking to achieve depth of field, either in closeup/macro work or landscape. For closeup/macro, you start by picking a picture of something with some depth - like a flower. Using the lens' sharpest aperture, which is usually F8, your first picture will be the part of the flower closest to the camera. It will be extremely sharp and in focus but the rest of the image won't be. If you have a focusing rail, you could then advance the position of the camera forward in tiny increments, stopping to take a picture at each increment. This will move the focus plane deeper into the subject. You repeat this over and over until you are at the back of the flower. You then open a software application like Helicon Focus or Photoshop, and use the stacking instructions to combine the individual images into a single crisply focused single image with what seems completely impossible depth of field for the working distance and aperture. The other, probably more common approach is to simply manually adjust the focus. The problem with this approach is that many lenses made today will have some degree of "focus breathing" which just means that in order to get close to a subject the lens designer changes the focal length of the lens, diminishing it until the minimum focus is arrived at. So in this scenario, the focal length of the first image will be shorter and will lower magnification than the last image. Most software can handle that and make the proper adjustment, but not always.
You can do this and more using smart objects in Photoshop, where you load your individual images as layers and convert them to a single smart object then use a stackmode to do focus stacking, object removal, or noise reduction.
Lastly there is exposure stacking, or High Dynamic Range stacking, where you take a series of bracketed exposures, usually at least 3 and two stops apart, and combine them into a single image using Photoshop, LIghtroom, Photomatix Pro, Aurora HDR, etc. to ensure that you capture detail in the brightest and darkest areas of your scene. Logically, if you can do it in a single exposure it would imply that there is no need to do HDR stacking..
Some photographers will use stacking to achieve de... (
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Hello Gene! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. I appreciate the detail of your response. I understood most of it but can honestly say, I will need to do some studying!!