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Adventures in Focus Stacking

  • Thread starter Kyle
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Kyle

Kyle

My first attempts at focus stacking. Turned out alright, I think. I'm getting to be very suspicious that my monitor is horridly calibrated. I fear things that look perfectly exposed to me look far underexposed to y'all. Let me know. >.>;;

Oh, and ignore the uglies around some of the edges. Forgot to crop out the remnants of the image merging process. o_O

cephstack.png


cephstack2.png


burmstack.png


purpstack.png


purpstack2.png


finnstack.png


Anyone else that's done focus stacking, please feel free to share some pictures and advice and whatever else. ^.^

EDIT: A (very) succinct description of what focus stacking is: You take multiple shots of the same subject, changing the point of focus each time. The final image is the composite of all the images, the focused part of each being the only part each individual picture lends to the composite. It's used to increase depth of field, extremely helpful in macro photography.
 
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Very, very nice! Thank you for posting these.

I am just a "point and shoot" person myself with a cheap camera who occassionally gets a lucky shot. I envy you all who know how to use a camera and these pictures really show the difference. :hail:
 
Reaper, very nice indeed....

parameters please :)

Aperture?
How many images in the stack?
Stacking software used (if any)?
Stacking protocol used (if any)?

Av
 
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Use a focus rail.
 
Wow, cool pics. Can you say a little about what focus stacking is for those of us who are clueless?
 
one of my early attempts...
croppedrose4_hf.jpg


---------- Post added at 08:31 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:19 AM ----------

Decent focus stacking shareware (full version)

---------- Post added at 08:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:31 AM ----------
jbradt said:
Wow, cool pics. Can you say a little about what focus stacking is for those of us who are clueless?
Click to expand...

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/0U2KU6gXlZA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Wow. Simply wow. I never knew you could do this. This opens up so many more opportunities. Pics look great everyone!
 
Cool... thanks for the info, guys!
 
  • #10
What software are you using? The cephalotus and sarracenia look fantastic.

This is from a 2 or 3 image stack, done manually in photoshop
4588457258_9518a4d3c5_z.jpg
 
  • #11
Nice detail on the Ceh and purp! I just stop down the aperture to get more in focus, but I can tell that this is very different.
 
  • #12
Wow, those are pretty epic, Reap. I definitely need to try this!
 
  • #13
larry said:
What software are you using? The cephalotus and sarracenia look fantastic.

This is from a 2 or 3 image stack, done manually in photoshop
4588457258_9518a4d3c5_z.jpg
Click to expand...

Spectacular shot! How'd you manage to fool the fly into sitting still long enough to get multiple exposures? I have a hard enough time trying to get a single shot of flies on my sarrs!

I've never tried stacking, but this thread made me want to give it a try. Here's what I ended up with:

 
  • #14
Thanks, y'all.

@Butch: that's actually the picture that convinced me to try it out. ;p

@NaN: I might grab a focus rail when I get some tubes and start attempting some extreme macro photography, but until then I don't think it's necessary. It's fairly easy to get acceptable increments with just the focus ring, by hand.

@larry: That fly shot is really cool. Done manually? Ugh, no thanks, lol.

@Natalie: That's a cool picture, stacked or not. Haha. The "grain" on it looks really nice, in comparison to the grain of the table.

@butch & larry (and anyone else that asked and I missed it...):

I used Photoshop CS5.
Aperture was f/13, if I remember correctly.
If by stacking protocol, you mean what setting I used for the merging process, it was "collage." Lol, hope that answer your question...
Both the S. purpurea were 4 images, The Ceph closeup was 6, the Ceph group shot was 7, the D. burmannii was 7, the 'Judith Finn' was 3.
 
  • #15
this is awesome. thanks for sharing all this info. will definitely have to give this one a try...
 
  • #16
Today's attempts:
Cross-posted from my main thread

Some attempts at focus stacking. They aren't perfect, some of them are relatively bad, but I'm learning. For example, I've learned that Photoshop does NOT get along with high contrast shots, such as a picture of a Utricularia flower against a pure black background. I don't know why it confuses Photoshop so, but it does. It can't figure out how to align the slices, so it ends up looking awful. I'unno. I should try and get ahold of Helicon Focus and see if it does any better. If not, hopefully CS6 does a better job.

Anywho, here they are. Click for full-size.










I love this picture, but unfortunately I didn't get enough slices. If you look REALLY close (it helps to full-size it), you can find some banding. Whoops.


And this one simply turned out all-together not-so-hot. LOL. Who knows why? I sure don't.

---------- Post added at 03:22 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:14 AM ----------

Here's what I mean by Photoshop's anti-high-contrast-ness:

A series of photos like this:

badex.png


Turns into this:

badex2.png


Really, Photoshop, really? What the eff? *facepalm*

I had numerous series of photos that exhibited similar contrast, and resulted in similar composites. o_O
 
  • #17
My most recent attempt....

ionasii_flowering_hf.jpg

The first time I made it, i used 10 images in the stack.... I dropped that back to 5 and it looked better.
(Helicon Focus)

It seems the less images in the stack the less processing errors (common sense I guess), but you also have to have enough overlap to prevent banding.

Too many and "ghosting" starts becoming an issue... and the more shallow the subject, the better the results it seems

(I think this was 20 images @ f2.8 IIRC: http://bluegrasscarnivores.com/rose/rose4.jpg) definitely has some "ghosting"

Reaper, try the free software I posted the link to.... but you've got to convert your images to tiff before it will load them.

Butch
 
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  • #18
I did try that, Butch, but it was doing the same thing. At first, I was thrilled with it because it gave me good dew stacks (which Photoshop didn't like last time), but then I realized it was relatively buggy and no more effective than Photoshop (since, today, it handled dew just fine...). And if I'm going to use Photoshop anyway for the final touches, might as well do it all in Photoshop.

I've been using JPEGs, actually, so I'm going to try RAW. I guess I'll find out if that works any better. And I'll try pushing the aperture to around f/16 so I can get fewer slices without banding.

Experimentation FTW!
 
  • #19
I use raw with Helicon, works my poor laptop to death LOL
Dont have CS5 to give it a try.... still got CS3 here

I was reading the blog of one artist who does FS.... she said she will also groups stacks. She will make a foreground, midground and background stack and then stack those.

But she also said sometimes you just gotta post process and put back in the areas that ghost, etc.

Natalie, love the image btw.... very cool....
Larry, yours are always stunning :p
 
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  • #20
Wow those dew shots are AMAZING dude.. Were those done in the other program or CS5?

One suggestion I have for the utric shots, when reading up on focus stacking, I read in a few places that the photos need to be a good exposure(not too dark) and every picture needs to be exactly the same exposure, or else it confuses the program. Maybe thats the problem with the utric photo? Just not enough for it to go off of or something?
 
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