- You ever wonder about the
whole focus bracketing thing? You know the settings
and how easy is it to do. Wonder no more. It is awesome. It's a lot of fun and
the best thing about it, is that you can do it anywhere you are, any place you are right now. It doesn't get any better
than this roll into, roll intro. Come on, let's get this thing working. Roll intro. Let's try this. (dramatic music) Hi everyone and welcome to PAL2TECH. Today we're gonna learn how to focus stack through the use of the
focus bracketing feature on the Fujifilm X-T3, X-T2 on even X-T4. It's great for three reasons. First, for landscape photography, let's say you can't or you
don't wanna stop down your lens. Focus stacking will give you
that much needed flexibility for your images and
particularly for landscape. Number two, macro photography. It really shines for
close-up macro images. You can achieve some very striking photos with amazing close-ups. And number three, it's
just plain fun, right? I mean different lenses will give you completely different experiences and allow you to get really creative, using the focus bracketing technique. Now before we get too far into it, there is a difference between focus stacking
and focus bracketing. For the purpose of this video,
when I say focus bracketing, I mean that feature on the Fujifilm camera that will allow the camera
to take a series of photos, each one with a different part in focus which you can then manipulate later on in post processing software
such as Photoshop or Lightroom. Focus stacking, refers to that technique which you can use for any
camera in Photoshop or Lightroom or third party software,
which then takes a series of photos and we'll stack them together. So for the most part they're
kinda the same thing, but there is a slight
difference between the two. So if you hear focus bracketing, it's more geared towards
that feature on this camera that I'm gonna show you how to set up. If you're hearing focus stacking, that is more the overall general technique of what I'm about to teach you. In today's tutorial, we are
gonna use an X-T3 camera, but the exact same settings
that I'm gonna teach you, will apply to the X-T2 that has the most current firmware updates. Focus stacking begins
with an understanding of depth of field. Depth of field is the
distance between the closest and the furthest objects in
a photo that are in focus. Many people assume that depth
of field is solely determined by the aperture of the lens. You know F11 has more
depth of field than F4. The smaller the lens aperture,
the more depth of field that you have. But depth of field is also
determined by the focal length of the lens as well as the
distance between the camera and the subject. To shoot with focus bracketing, first off, you must have a sturdy tripod. It's the same principle as if you were shooting time-lapse photos. And by the way, if you wanna
learn more about time-lapse, I have an awesome video of it right here. Second for the macro shot demo that we'll be doing right
now, I'm gonna be using a common Fujifilm prime lens as well as the Fujifilm macro
extension tube, MCEX-11. The first thing you're
gonna need to do to prepare your camera for focus stacking, is to put this dial in bracketing mode. Don't forget to do that. It's an easy mistake to
make and if you keep it in S or continuous or
continuous low or whatever, that is a real gotcha. Next, I recommend shooting raw for sure. That'll give you the most options later on in post production. So, make sure you have your
camera set to shoot raw. Next, I recommend setting the
shutter to electronic shutter. Another tip, when choosing
a location to start your focus bracketing, if
you've never really done it before, I recommend doing it indoors in kind of a macro setup close-up, so that you can have full
control over the lighting while you're using this technique. It's really difficult if you're
outside and you're not used to it and suddenly the
light changes between shots. So, I recommend do it indoors first, which I guess shouldn't be a
problem now for most of us. Before you start shooting
your focus stacking photos, take a picture of the front of your hand before you start the process. Then when you're finished, take one of the back of your hand. That way when you bring it
into Lightroom or Photoshop and you have that series of pictures, you will know where it
begins and where it ends. Now one major recommendation I have, is to make sure your camera
is in full manual mode. So, basically you set your
aperture, shutter speed and ISO, so that you have a
very nice histogram value. If you don't know how
to read a histogram yet, well do the best you can
and use the camera's, light meters and LCD display
to give you information as to your proper exposure. But if you do wanna learn
how to use a histogram, not bad, let me know in the comments below and I'll do a video on that. Next, you wanna disable
automatic white balance. I would recommend setting a
custom white balance using a professional color shutter. Heck, you can even use
a white piece of paper. You don't wanna use a
real wide open aperture such as F2.8. On the other hand, you
certainly wouldn't wanna use a small aperture such as F22 or F16 because you wanna avoid any possibility of distortion or any,
you know, you wanna find that sweet spot on the lens, right? And that's the aperture at which the lens has the best image quality all the way from the corners straight into the middle. And that can depend on
what kind of lens you have. Each lens has its own
sweet spot, you know, best aperture for best image quality. And generally as a general rule of thumb, your lenses sweet spot will be between two to three stops down from
the lenses maximum aperture. So in the case of this lens right here, the 35 millimeter F2.0,
say three stops down for maximum aperture. If maximum aperture is F2, one, two, three, like that F5.6. Another thing that I
recommend is that you check that your lens is able to
focus on the furthest part of the shot that you want to appear sharp. This is especially important
if you're using a macro lens or extension tubes. You also wanna put your
focus mode in manual. I recommend doing that. Yes, you can make it work
with the focus point on S, but I've just found that
if you kinda think of it as I'm gonna put the whole
camera and everything in manual, it's just easier to remember. And now you need to set up your focus bracketing menu options. And they are set up
differently depending upon what you are shooting,
the type of lens you have, the distance you are to the subject, your creative vision, all
of that kind of stuff. Okay, to go into the focus
bracket settings of the camera. You go into the little camera
icon and choose Drive Setting. From here, select Bracket Setting. Now, this is an area that
can really trip people up because you have an area at
the top and at the bottom. Do you see that right there? What you need to do is,
on the one on the top. You need to change brackets select. It'll probably be an
exposure bracketing default. Change this to Focus Bracket. Do you see that? I cannot tell you the amount of times, I would make all my other settings. I go out to shoot and it wouldn't work and I guarantee you that is
gonna trip some of you up. Tap Menu Bracket Select,
choose Focus Bracket. Once you've done that, go down
to focus bracket down here and now we have our three options. The first is frames. Frames is the total number
of images that you're taking, which can be set between one and 999. One thing to keep in
mind is that the camera will stop shooting once
it reaches infinity and gets all of the shots
and focus that it needs. So, you can't go wrong setting
this to a higher number than you think you're gonna need. As a good starting point. I set it to 50, okay now step. This setting I think is the
single most undocumented and confusing setting on all
of the Fujifilm camera system. Step is the setting you
make to specify the distance that the camera moves,
the focus point forward as you take each shot. Each of the one to 10
step numbers corresponds to a certain value of distance. The lower the step number,
the less the distance, the focus point will be moved
forward between each shot. So here's what's happening
behind the scenes. As soon as you press the shutter and take your first
picture, the camera runs a quick calculation of the distance between the near and the far
limit of the depth of field of that very first image
that you've just taken. So, if you're shooting
close-up macro, let's say, then that initial step value
can be only a few millimeters. However, if you're shooting
a landscape scene outside, you know, that distance could
be a few feet or meters. Are you with me so far? So, when the camera shoots
the very first photo in the bracketing series, the
step distance reference value is initially assigned. Now, here's how the step
numbers one through 10, come into play. If you set the step number to one, this will move the focus
point forward by 20% of the total calculated
distance between each shot. Step two, will move it forward 40% and each step will increment it by 20% until it reaches step five. At step five, you are
now telling the camera to use 100% of that initial
reference value of the distance that was calculated on
that first shot you took. So, between each shot again, the camera will move the focus point forward, exactly matching that initial
calculated distance value based on the step number
preference that you've made here. Now, in all my research, I
couldn't find anywhere official that explained what happens if
you use steps six through 10. However, logically one
would think that step six would move the focus point forward 120% of the initial calculated distance. Step seven would move it forward 140% until you reach step 10 at which point you would be moving
the focus point forward at double the initial calculated value. Think of these numbers
as like a volume knob. The higher the number, the
higher the step number, the greater the distance the
camera will move that area of focus as it takes each shot. Frankly, if you're feeling
a little lost with all of this technical explanation,
let me help you out. Just set it to step 10, I
think that will work out well for you in a variety
of shooting situations. So, I could have just said
that off the beginning, but I wanted to tell you
what's going on here. Next is the interval, and the
interval is simply the time in seconds that the camera
will pause between each shot in the focus bracketing series. Now, if you're shooting
with an electronic shutter, you can go ahead and set this to zero. You don't need the camera to wait at all. But if you're using a
mechanical shutter, then, or let's say you're on a
tripod that you don't think is quite stable for whatever reason, you could bump this up to one second. I have never said it to
anything other than zero and it's worked just fine. Okay, for the subject of my
focus bracketing tutorial today will be this ABC pin right here, came from the 1984 Olympics. We're gonna be shooting this with the Fujifilm 35
millimeter prime F2.0, using the macro extension
tube that I mentioned earlier. Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is set my custom white balance. I'm gonna get my lighting setup. I've got this little kinda
small aperture light just to throw a bit extra
light onto it right here and in the camera menu
settings, I'm gonna go ahead and drop my ISO down to 160, the lowest until I can kinda balance it out, right about here I think is okay. Not too bad there, but I do need to set my custom white balance
so that it's consistent. For that, I'm just gonna use a white piece of paper right here,
simple and I'm gonna put it as close as I can to
the subject right here. I go into my menu settings, into the image quality area and down to where it says
white balance custom, I'm gonna go ahead and press okay. And it says to put a piece
of paper within that square, that white square there,
and then to go ahead and press the shutter
release to take a picture which will then set the
custom white balance. I'm gonna do that right now. Boom, you see that? You see how it changed? Look at that. Then I'm gonna say, okay, to set it, I now have, oh... that looks better. That looks better already. White piece of paper is all you need folks and that's gonna stay consistent between every single shot
of the focus bracketing. To kind of prepare this,
for manual focusing, I went into my menu and
I set manual focus assist to peak red highlight,
see that red highlight. So, now when I turn, I've
got it in manual focus. When I turn the focus ring,
you can kinda see the red, which is the area that happens
to be in focus, you see that? So, what I'm gonna do is just check that I can get the
entire area of this pin, the entire subject in focus. So I'm turning the ring,
I'm going through it, turning, turning, turning,
turning, turning, turning. And there you see the back right there. I might wanna actually move
it up just a little bit there. Okay, now I go back and
what you wanna do first is focus on the area closest to you. So in this case it's gonna be right here. Another thing you could do to just check your focus even more, is
press the back command dial like that and it zooms
in and you can do this. See that? Okay. I think that's pretty good. Next we're gonna go into our
focus bracketing settings as I mentioned earlier and just confirm that we have 50 frames, 10 step zero interval, and finally I am going
to go into my self timer and just set it for two
seconds, just to avoid the shake of pressing down the
shutter release button. So, we are ready to go. And nothing happened. Why did nothing happen? (laughs) I warned you. I warned you in the
beginning of this video, you need to put the
dial, the Fujifilm dial in bracketing mode (laughs). I always forget that. No, this is not a bit for this video. I literally just forgot to do this okay. And I'm teaching you
this, so people forget, at least I forget. Let's try it again, okay, here we go. And I'm pressing the shutter release. Now, it doesn't seem
like much has happened, but the camera has actually
taken 50 shots of this pin. Each one stepped forward
with various focus points. Got it? Okay, now that we have them. Let's go into Lightroom,
Photoshop and a couple of other great programs
and let me show you, how to focus stack. The first thing I like to
do once I have my photos in Lightroom, is sort
them by capture time. That way it's absolutely guaranteed for me that they're gonna be in the order of that focus stacking
point moving forward. Now, you have kind of
two ways of doing this. You could edit and make
all of your adjustments and fine tuning to the first
photo, say in the series and then copy all of those adjustments to all the other photos. Or, you could do nothing at all and just start focus
stacking and then when you're finished focused stacking, you'll have that one finished photo and that could be the photo you work on and make your final adjustments. Okay, so to start the
photo stacking process, we are going to send these images from Lightroom into Photoshop. Here's how you do that. Select the first photo,
go all the way to the end, select the last photo, then select photo, Edit in, Open as Layers in Photoshop. What that's going to do
is, open up Photoshop, take each photo that you've selected and make it its own separate layer. Now, keep in mind that
if you're using raw files from your Fujifilm, particularly
uncompressed raw files, it's gonna be a huge Photoshop
file if you go to save it. You might wanna consider
working only in JPEG, but then of course you're
gonna lose your versatility and ability to make significant
adjustments to the photo. So, what I tend to do,
is I always shoot in raw, I bring them into Photoshop in raw. I process them in Photoshop, and then I will merge all
the layers into one layer and then just save it
that way as one TIFF file, which I can then go back into Lightroom and make my adjustments on. Once they arrive in
Photoshop, you will see each of the raw files as
its own separate layer. What you wanna do is
select all of the layers. So, start with the first
one, go down to the bottom, hold down Shift, so that
you've selected all the layers. Then you wanna go to
Edit, Auto Align Layers. Make sure that auto is ticked right there. You do not need to do
anything else and click Okay. What Photoshop is now doing
is aligning each layer. You're gonna need to do this to get ready for the next step you're gonna take. This can take a while, so you know, go grab a cup of coffee or
something and then come back. Okay, so now that that's done,
you need to do another step. You need to actually
merge them into one layer. So, what you're going to do is make sure that all of them are selected again, go to Edit, Auto Blend Layers. Make sure that stack images
is selected right here and tick the box that says
seamless tones and colors. Go ahead and tick, okay. What Photoshop is
actually doing right now, is it's creating layer
masks based on what areas of the photos are in focus or not. Once, that's finished, you can
now see you have layer masks for each of the areas that are in focus. This is very, very cool. Have a look at this. This is the final result. Now, if you wanna save this
and go back into Lightroom or something you should know because you have all of these layers and each one is basically a raw file. If you try and save this as a regular TIFF or Photoshop with all of
the layers, forget it. You won't be able to, it'll be too big. So, what I do, is I go
up to file, save as, and I'll rename this to
something like you know, final merged Photoshop. Make sure you untick layers. That's what I do, I untick
layer, so it's just gonna save that as one merged together file. I click save. Now if I bring it back into Lightroom, there it is right here at the end and I can then go into my develop module and make whatever
adjustments that I want to. Keep in mind that if you
do and you're working on the adjustments after the
fact, you're not going to be able to get those
Fujifilm, film simulations as you would in the
beginning of the process if you copy them across,
if that makes sense. Photoshop is not the only game
in town to do focus stacking. There are third party software programs that are built specifically
to help you do focus stacking, Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. What I really like about Helicon
Focus is that it integrates into Lightroom, so what you
can do is instead of going over to Photoshop and doing all that, you can select all the photos in Lightroom and then export them
right into Helicon Focus. Let me show you how you do that. Okay, so I'm selected all my photos and all I'm doing right
now is going into my export and there it is right there,
Helicon Focus, you see that? And that's it. It's gonna now bring it into
that third party program. I am literally gonna do the settings that come up right here,
radius on two smoothing on two. And these actually give
you way more control, at least easier control than
you would get in Photoshop. I'm gonna go ahead and hit render. It basically converts
your Fujifilm raw files into TIFF before it brings
it into Helicon focus. Have a look at this. Look at this. All finished and there it is,
it brought it right back in, and if I go into the develop
module, I can see it. This came from the third party program, round tripped back into Lightroom. Finally, let's look at a
third app Zerene Stacker. Now, this one will not work
with native Fujifilm raw files, so you either have to
convert them into TIFF or you could just throw the JPEGs in here. I'm just gonna throw
the JPEGs in here just to show you. Dragging them over and dropping them into the program right here. Let's see how it looks with the JPEGs. Okay, once it's done, I'm gonna go ahead and save output image as a TIFF 16-bit and here it is. The photo on the left is
done by Zerene Stacker. The photo on the right
is done by Photoshop. But one thing that I noticed, is that Photoshop didn't
handle some of the areas that were out of focus. So, have a look at this. If you zoom in and you look over here, you see this area right here, not so good. That was Photoshop, okay? I'm sure you could dig down into Photoshop and you could manually added
all of the layer masks, but for a minimum of hassle
and a minimum of fuss, if you just quickly process
those into a focus stack, Zerene Stacker does a
better job than Photoshop, according to how I'm testing it here. I started this video
and doing the research and doing the demos of focus stacking. I started it, way back
last year in November. I've literally been working
on this video longer than this pandemic has been on the earth. And I have to tell you,
I'm glad I stuck with it and I'm glad I finally have
been able to show it to you because I think more than
ever, now is the time to try this out. It is a lot of fun. I will have links to resources
down below that can help you. I really hope you've enjoyed this video. If you did and if you found it helpful, please give it the like and subscribe and of course I will see you
in another video real soon. Take care. This is the stuff you don't see, because a lot of YouTubers will cut it out, right? Okay, I'm importing the photos
into the Lightroom now, boom. And then they're important and
actually behind the scenes, we just sit here with nothing to do, but maybe have some water still waiting. I should do a patreon account, where all I do, everybody
pays a dollar a month and they get to watch what
happens while I'm waiting for photos to import into Lightroom. I wonder if I could, if I could like make a few bucks off that (laughs). I better do something,
this channel's not making a lot of money right now. All right, let's get back to it.
