In the current issue of Better Photography magazine, Julie Pallant explains how she focus stacks to create incredible depth-of-field.
Writes Julie: This is a great time in history to be a photographer. There are so many ways to express our creativity supported by amazing advances in camera and lens technology to capture our images and sophisticated computer software to massage the pixels to create our art. In this article, I demonstrate ‘focus stacking’: a technique that combines these two components, camera and computer, to produce the final image.
Focus stacking involves combining/stacking a series of images, each with a different section of the object in focus. This is particularly useful in macrophotography or detailed product photography where the shallow depth-of-field often results in areas of the image out-of-focus. Look at the flower images on the opposite page. The opposite top image was taken without focus stacking – the middle and back petals are in focus, while the front petals are blurry. On the bottom, the whole flower is in focus, but it was achieved by taking a series of images and merging them in Adobe Photoshop."
Read Julie's step-by-step process in the current issue of Better Photography magazine! Not a subscriber yet? We'd love you to join - take $20 off with our coupon code IDEAS20.