The Art of Focus Stacking (BK-19)

 Focus Stacking

Interest in ‘focus stacking’ is increasing rapidly. In this short article, I would like to suggest some reasons why this might be. For those of you unfamiliar with focus stacking, let’s make clear what it is.

Just as exposure bracketing and HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques, where a number of photos are taken at different exposures and then seamlessly combined into a final photograph are popular, so focus stacking takes a series of single photos of an object each taken at a slightly different focus points and combines these photos seamlessly into a final photo that represents the object with everything in focus, as if it naturally had greater depth of field (DOF). This requires special software to align the series of photo­graphs and merge them into a single resulting image.

 

Focus Stacking is essentially ‘focus bracketing’ and the result is a photo where everything (or more than you might expect) appears to be in focus as opposed to the traditional photograph where there is only a single plane of focus and anything not on the plane is to some degree out of focus, however slightly. The resulting stacked photo (from combining the images at different focal distances) can be remarkable, and ad­vances in focus-stacking software like Zerene Stacker, Helicon Focus, Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 are perfecting this technique.