What Is Focus Stacking And How To Use It For Sharper Photos
At some point, just about every photographer turns his attention away from those more obvious subjects, and points his camera at the things that we don't often see—those tiny, thumbnail-sized things that we pass by every day but rarely stop to appreciate. Beware that not all scenes are good candidates for focus stacking. A popular one is focus stacking. For example, you may take three photos at a particular scene: one focused on the foreground, another on the middle-ground, and a third on the background. Many of the best photographs in history have had very deep depth of field.
Thanks Alyn, and yes, focus stacking can be very useful in any situation where you can't get everything in focus with one frame. Depth of focus in macro photography will be measured in fractions of an inch instead of feet as in landscape pieces. He then combined those images in post-processing until he got what you see before you—an image that is tack-sharp from foreground to background despite the fact that it is a macro.
The only way to create exceptional front-to-back sharpness is to employ a focus-staking technique. With the interval set to zero, the camera starts shooting the next photo as soon as the previous one is finished, meaning that the focus-shift series can be completed in the minimum amount of time.
One way to combat this is by ‘Focus Stacking' your image. In this mode the camera takes a sequence of 8 images in quick succession, shifting the sensor a little between each shot. On a macro shot of an insect or flower, where each shot has only a tiny Focus Stacking depth of field, you might wind up with 50 or more shots.
Ultimately, the focus-stacking process can create a final digital photograph with a very sharp, highly-detailed 3D lookâ€. Once photoshop has finished importing the images it will put them in the layers box on the right-hand side. Focus Stacking, is often used in closeup and macro photography, when you're already dealing with extremely shallow depths of field.