First Shot at Focus Stacking!

Hey All!

I did a focus stacking project!

I don't want to just repeat what I put into the Macro sub-forum, where there's a fuller version:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1095756

In a nutshell, I took five shots of a spider with my trusty ol' 30D and the old 100mm Macro lens and, after doing some stuff in Lightoom, converted them to tiffs and brought them into my trusty ol' Photoshop CS3, using the Bridge/Tools->Photoshop->Photomerge utility, which loads all the shots in layers, aligns the pixels (this is needed), and adds masks,

So, heres a crop of one of the originals:

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Ease up on the sharpening! Nice photo otherwise

Hey, thanks Tim, and yeah, the sharpening was just for fun -- if I get motivated, I'll probably just do some of that in Lightroom with a local adjustment sharpening brush!

I love this! Very nice!

I tried this once before! But couldn't get it right. Is it completely necessary to have a panning tripod?

Whenever I focused on a different area the "zoom" changed a bit. I don't know if that makes sense, but each shot I took at a different focus plane, depending on how far from the camera it was, the size didn't match. (shot with the 17-85mm USM)

Was this done with a standard tripod / lens?

SASman wrote in post #13144608
I love this! Very nice!

I tried this once before! But couldn't get it right. Is it completely necessary to have a panning tripod?

Whenever I focused on a different area the "zoom" changed a bit. I don't know if that makes sense, but each shot I took at a different focus plane, depending on how far from the camera it was, the size didn't match. (shot with the 17-85mm USM)

Was this done with a standard tripod / lens?

Thanks!

I shot it with a standard tripod and a 100mm Macro lens.

There is no zoom, although for each shot there was a little "shifting" and so all the shots needed to be aligned. You can do that in Photoshop, but I had a hard time remembering how! But going through Bridge automated the process of stacking the photos and aligning the pixels,

I don't have any of the dedicated stacking software, but it worked with Photoshop!

I love that shot! I had tried before but lacked the retouching skills, maybe I should give it another go :P

tonylong wrote in post #13144991
There is no zoom, although for each shot there was a little "shifting" and so all the shots needed to be aligned. You can do that in Photoshop, but I had a hard time remembering how! But going through Bridge automated the process of stacking the photos and aligning the pixels,

Thanks! I noticed (it could be the fact that I was using a zoom lens / a non macro lens) that when I changed the plane of focus the "Size" of the image in the view finder would also change. So so hard to explain.

Will give it another shot soon!

riotseeds wrote in post #13145889
I love that shot! I had tried before but lacked the retouching skills, maybe I should give it another go :P

Thanks! I don't do macro very often, or other types of shots that could benefit from this, but one does tire of firing off shots like this and having a too-narrow DOF, so, since this spider tends to stay pretty still for periods of time I figured it'd make a good "test subject"!

Getting the manual focus down does require keeping an eye on the viewfinder while focusing, then I back off and use a cable release to cut back on button-pushing vibration! A sturdy tripod works! I didn't use mirror lockup because I thought my shutter speed was fast enough to not need it, although it was probably borderline at 1/6 sec.

Only three shots out of eight showed a bit of blur viewing at 100%, so having five to work with gave me some good "raw materials"

The work in Photoshop is pretty straghtforward since, as I said, the Photomerge utility does the "hard lifting" of stacking and aligning the layers and then applying masks that are "pre-figured with some black/white areas, although they aren't useful for the actual adjustments you want to make!

Here shows actual work I did on one of the layers -- the bottom one had a lot of usable area and the automerge had all the spider in the white area, showing through, so on this second layer I did use Lightroom as a reference and I just painted the white over the parts that showed good detail:

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So is this different than using the Scripts/Load Files Into Stack thing? That's all I have tried before.

canonloader wrote in post #13146407
So is this different than using the Scripts/Load Files Into Stack thing? That's all I have tried before.

You know, I didn't try that! That may be what I've used in the past doing exposure blending, I don't recall, but I do know that going through Bridge for Photomerge has worked for me. But I'm so dang out of practice with Photoshop I was just doing some fumbling and bumbling until I got to the proper "starting point" with the Photomerge.

I guess I should probably try that!

I should note: for a "normal" macro shot like this I'd aim for shooting at f/16, but the light here was a little dim so I shot at f/11, figuring that it would still give me good results for focus stacking. I shot at ISO 200, because at 400 the 30D begins to show some noise at these close crops, and I didn't want to deal with NR concerns. Even then the smooth background did benefit from some Masking and NR in Lightroom, but not enough to mess things up.

Well, I already tried it, and it seems to be much more automated that what your doing, and it didn't work. Try it, but I'll be surprised if you get any good results.

I'm going to try your way, I just looked in Bridge CS5 and it's there.

canonloader wrote in post #13146613
Well, I already tried it, and it seems to be much more automated that what your doing, and it didn't work. Try it, but I'll be surprised if you get any good results.

I'm going to try your way, I just looked in Bridge CS5 and it's there.

OK, Mitch, I'll give it a shot. What particularly didn't work for you?

It was all automated and when it was done, it looked like it hadn't done anything. Been awhile, so I don't remember details.

canonloader wrote in post #13146795
It was all automated and when it was done, it looked like it hadn't done anything. Been awhile, so I don't remember details.

Hmm, OK, I'll take a look (when I'm motivated to dig into things!)...