Focus Stacking

I just posted a new piece on my mentoring blog, how create a stacked image photo. Stacking, aligning and blending several images with different focal points can be used to create an image with tremendous focal range, even greater than with a tilt-shift lens at close distances. The technique and images used to create a stacked image in Photoshop are shown at www.fotocritique.blogs​pot.com.

The first photo has the front focus, the second a fully stacked image.

Thank you, always wanted to learn how to do that.

A quick question, do i need photoshop for this or can i do this in canon DPP?

I do stacking in Photoshop. I don't use DPP so I could tell you.

To the best of my knowledge, Canon DPP 3x or 4x does not support Focus Stacking.

For free software for Focus stacking check out Picolay or CombineZM

http://combinezm.en.lo​4d.com/

http://www.picolay.de/

I am a noobie so forgive me if this is a silly question, but what is the advantage to doing this vs shooting stopped down?

Goodform wrote in post #18452179
I am a noobie so forgive me if this is a silly question, but what is the advantage to doing this vs shooting stopped down?

A couple main ones that I know of:
1. Lenses are generally at their sharpest in the middle apertures (f/5.6 to f/8); past that the image gets softer due to diffraction
2. At macro (or close-up) distances even stopping down does not give enough depth-of-field, and focus stacking is still necessary to get the entire subject sharp

I can attest to #2 above. It is almost impossible to get enough depth of field when shooting macro, even if you stop-down to f/32.

Thanks for the education, it makes sense now why stacking would be beneficial!

Also, even if you do stop down, say to f11-f16 and everything is in the 'theoretical' DOF, the focal plane is still quite a bit sharper than the edges of the DOF. So if you want to print larger than 8x10 or have something that looks consistently sharp you can focus stack.

This is also good for sharpening the corners of a landscape taken with an UWA.

Moon shots. Not for depth of field, rather to address the issue of shooting through the entire atmosphere. Take 10-20 photos. Focus stacking software will choose the least affected area of each photo and combine into one photo containing the best info of all the shots.