Focus Shift Shooting / Stacking Explained for Nikon Z Cameras

[Music] hi everybody joe here from shadowspeak photography very nice to see your smiling faces again here on youtube thanks for watching today i'm going to talk a little bit about focus shift shooting with your nikon z series camera with the fall leaves coming down now this is a great time to take advantage of some focus shift shooting i'm going to show you why you're going to want to do that and i'm going to set up two different scenarios for you with vastly different setups so that you have a real good understanding of how focused shift shooting works and why you'd want to use it so essentially why would you want to use it well let's say you're out and there's some beautiful fall leaves coming down you're at a real nice location for a landscape shot but you want to have those leaves in the foreground nice and sharp but you also want to have your background sharp now you really can't do that in one shot even if you shot at f 22 you're going to have some of the image that's going to be out of focus whether it be in the foreground or the background so nikon has a solution for that it's called focus shift shooting it's built into your nikon z camera it's gonna work great for this type of setup it's easy to do and then additionally i'm gonna run you through shooting something like a close-up shot we're going to take this little landspeeder with luke and c3po and we're going to put it on the desk and again we're going to shoot this from close up and it's a vastly different setup and i'm going to show you that and once you've seen these two different setups in action you're going to be able to do this with any scenario that you come across so before we get started i'd just like to say thanks for watching i appreciate you being here and if anything in this video helps you out please help me out by hitting subscribe and ring the bell so you get notified of updates when they come out for the channel i would greatly appreciate that it's something that if anything that i've done helps you out you can help me out by hitting that and best of all it's free right so thank you in advance also feel free to hit that like button and leave me a comment because i do answer most of them so with that all out of the way let's get started okay so to get to focus shift shooting head down to the photo shooting menu and then you're gonna have to scroll all the way down until you get to focus shift shooting it's way at the bottom second from the bottom actually okay select focus shift shooting and you're going to see a bunch of menu options here first off is the number of shots now this is going to vary based on your shooting scenario shooting landscapes generally you can do about five shots and that should be enough if you're shooting something very close up or in very close proximity to the camera your depth of field is much more shallow and you're going to need a lot more shots okay so here's where you would pick the number of shots you don't have to worry so much about picking too many because when the camera reaches infinity it will automatically stop but you do have to worry about shooting too little so better to go above than below focus step with is kind of a bit of a judgment call here okay however shooting something very close you're going to want this to be narrow if you were shooting a landscape somewhere around here should be fine okay it's again kind of a judgment call and you got to play with it a little bit but right around this setting right in the middle here about five stop shots or so should get you through your average landscape interval till next shot that's how much of a delay in between shots if you're not using a flash or something like that you can set this to zero first frame lock uh for exposure yes you're gonna you're going to want to lock the exposure off the first shot so each shot has the same exposure otherwise you can have blending problems down the road peeking the stack image on or off doesn't really much matter it doesn't affect anything it's just for you to be able to see the depth of field at the end use it or don't use it up to you silent photography again up to you and you can change the storage folder to whatever folder you'd like based on this function okay and then once you have everything set up all you need to do is go up here to start and then as soon as you press start the camera will prepare and start shooting so that's all there is to it let's try it out okay so here's the setup of how we're gonna shoot this first series of images uh obviously you see it's a close-up so we're shooting with the nikon z7 but it doesn't matter uh what's the series camera it was i have the 24 to 70 lens on and of course you see the lan speeder is right up front and way off in the distance we have a little jawa and of course way way back in the distance there's r2d2 and you're going to see how there's just no way we would be able to focus on all of this and how focus shift shooting is going to save the day all right so let's give it a try okay so we're here in lightroom and we can take a look at the depth of field of each of these images and what focus shift shooting has done to help us out to get a crystal clear image across the board so let's take a look so you can see the first image we're clearly focused somewhere down here and it's important not to start on the land speeder here we don't want to start here if you notice we did start down here because we want to get this foreground in focus also otherwise when we do the stacking later in photoshop it's going to be a bit of a mess and i'll show you why that is so it's important to start as far down as you can if we had started here on the back of speeder when we compiled the images later this foreground would have been a blur and it would have looked very awkward so that's why i started down here so start at the lowest point that you can in the image okay and as we step through i'm gonna see the focus point moving slightly slightly slightly until we get all the way to the back of the photo and now you see the foreground going out of focus okay so it looks like right around here it looks like uh r2d2 let's wait for this to load is pretty much in focus and even though we took 20 we probably really only needed about 12 or so um focus shift shooting will stop when it reaches infinity okay but in this case it kept going because i guess it never reached infinity but if we had set this to 100 photos for example and it only needed 25 to get to infinity it would have stopped to 25 it wouldn't have taken 100 it's better to have more than less in some cases when you're out shooting landscapes you're only going to need four or five um when i was shooting i was setting uh my shots at five and the camera was stopping at four because it had reached infinity in the vocal plane so you don't need to worry about going too high but you definitely need to worry about going too low so i'd rather have more images than less okay so now let's take a look at how we can combine these 12 images two different ways we can do it through photoshop and uh also you could do it through on one on one has a merge feature built into it however it only uses i believe up to 14 images as its cap in this case since we only have 12 we could use it but if we had needed all 20 it wouldn't have worked for us i'm going to do it in photoshop just to show you how it looks in photoshop and let's get started with that all right so what we can do here is just do some basic edits so we're going to just quickly just go through here and we're not going to do much just to keep this video from becoming too long but we'll just apply basic profile here maybe add a little clarity and a little vibrance that's good enough for now i'm going to take these 12 photos and we're going to right click on them and we're going to go to edit in and then we're going to say open layers in photoshop that's important you want to open these as layers if you don't open them as layers they're going to be individual files and you're not going to be able to merge them so we'll wait a few seconds for this to load into photoshop and open up all the layers okay so we have all our layers now loaded into photoshop and the first step to this is we need to align the layers just in case there is any slight movement in these images obviously you know we shot on a tripod but nonetheless we still need to align these layers just to make sure okay so to align all these layers you're just going to click on the first layer shift click and click on that top layer to select them all swing on over to the edit menu and then say auto align layers okay projection leave set to auto and just say okay and it's going to swing through its magic and it's going to align these layers and make sure that they're perfect if there's any variants we're going to see a little bit of a highlighted area and there usually is and that's why it's always important to make sure you run through this step okay so we have our layers aligned and you can see on the edges there are some areas here that didn't line up perfectly and it's very typical when you're doing this that you're going to need to do some cropping and that's going to be okay so the next step is we're going to go back into edit and we're going to select the auto blend layers okay this image dialog opens up and if it's not already selected check stack images and leave these two check boxes checked and just say ok and it's now going to step through each of these images photoshop taking the best parts and blending them into one image for us okay so we have our final merged image at the top we do have some areas here that we're missing so ctrl d to deselect that we're going to definitely have to do some cropping and we have a little problem here where the merge didn't really grab the focused area as well as we would have liked but that's okay you can see each layer has a mask okay so we can just deselect all of these images and we're just going to pop this one on this is our top layer there and you can see that this has the closest focus let me just show you what that looks like so this was the layer with the closest focus and i could tell that just by the file number it was the lowest file number and we did start from the front and worked our way back so in order to fix that all i really need to do here is just paint in on the mask and so let me grab my paintbrush tool and oops wrong color painting with white and we can grab more of the foreground here and just by grabbing more of the foreground that's going to eliminate our focus problems up front so how now the entire foreground looks much better okay but again we would have to we could just do a ctrl alt shift e to stack that and then we would have a stacked image of all of our fixed layers okay so now again we don't have that front focus problem anymore we still would need to do a little bit of cropping pull the image up to right around there we don't need all this wall and we certainly don't need all of this so if we pull this image into somewhere around here and did a crop i'd be super happy with that so let's take a look at that let's fit the screen and you can see now how we have a super sharp depth of field across the entire image and maybe we could have done a little bit better over here uh but photoshop seems to have done a really good job you would have never been able to do this uh without focus shift shooting you can see the sharpness of r2d2 all the way back here the sharpness of the jawa over here the land speeder and the front desk one thing i will say is if you have even the slightest speck of dust on anything it is going to show up right away and one of the things i did do was wiped everything down and i blew off the characters with some compressed air first because again anything that settles on these is going to really pop in the image okay so that's how this is going to work and now i'm going to show you another example but with some fall leaves in a landscape scenario that's going to be vastly different okay let's check that out okay so we're back inside lightroom but this time we have an outdoor setup and in this scenario i only needed four photos so i was out with the d i'm sorry the z7 i used focus shift shooting i was shooting at f 11 in aperture priority mode to keep the aperture consistent and also had auto iso off to keep the iso consistent throughout the image have four shots here the goal was to keep these leaves in the foreground as sharp as we can get them with having the background sharp as well and you see how focus shifting has stepped through that till we get to our fourth image where the background is sharper and the foreground is less sharp so in this particular scenario i had the camera set for five images it reached focus at infinity at the fourth shot and automatically stop shooting so i didn't have to worry about having a fifth image and again it's gonna be the same process we're just gonna select all of these and we're gonna go to edit in and open as layers in photoshop okay so we have our four layers and again just shift click on the bottom layer with the top selected go down to image auto align projection auto say okay and in a minute it will align these and then we'll merge them and in the meantime i'm going to go over a few things just to be aware of when you're working with this focus shift shooting okay so again into edit go to blend stack and we'll say okay so a few things to think about nikon tells us that when we're in focus shifting mode we should choose an f-stop somewhere in the neighborhood of f 8 to f 11. reason for that is that most lenses are sharpest in the middle so you're going to get the maximum amount of sharpness it doesn't mean that you can't use other apertures this is just what's recommended so anywhere between f8 and f11 in both of these scenarios we used f11 okay during shooting you could use the standby timer however if the standby timer runs out you will not have to worry about that the camera will to continue to shoot okay you can create that peaking stacked image which we did in the first example and that'll show us where our sharpness is and and that's sandy it's optional you could keep that on or off uh that's kind of up to you if you're using a flash something to look out for is that you have an interval set that's long enough for your flash to recycle so uh using the interval until next shot setting maybe you want to set a delay of one second two seconds just to give your flash enough time to recycle if you're using a flash okay and in silent photography mode if you did that iso sensitivities of high 0.3 to high 2 are not available neither is flash photography exposure delay mode or flicker reduction none of those things would be available to you okay so those just a couple of things uh to look out for but aside from that it's pretty straightforward really just set it up the way we did and hit that start button okay so we now have our merged image and we can take a look at this and in this scenario photoshop nails it we don't have to worry much about any kind of focus problems here we have uh we have sharp focus throughout the image okay so now we do have a little bit of that's missed up there just deselect that we're good and again it looks like we are good we can zoom in down here and we have sharpness here we have our leaves here that are sharp and then all the way back to the back of the frame i probably do a little sky replacement here and of course now in the latest version of photoshop that's actually built in okay so to use sky replacement in photoshop just head on over to edit sky replacement again this is the latest version of photoshop only and from here you have a bunch of different skies you can choose and you'll see it it actually updates in real time so we'll just pick uh let's take a look at the sky that looks good and again we can shift the edges a little bit if we needed to change the brightness and the temperature um flip the sky if we wanted to again adjust the lighting in the foreground and just say okay we can pop that out to a new layer we have our sky replaced all right so there you have it that's pretty much the way focus shift shooting works get out there and shoot some fall leaves i hope this video helps you out if anything in this video does help you out please help me out by hitting like leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts on how this works for you or if you have any questions i do tend to answer pretty much every question that gets thrown at me so at least i try to anyway i can't answer everybody but i try my best so thanks again for watching uh please remember to subscribe if anything here helped you out hit that subscribe button and i will see you next time youtube thanks for watching bye you

Channel: Joseph Nuzzo

Views: 21,518

Rating: 4.9590583 out of 5

Keywords: focus stacking, nikon z6 focus shift shooting, focus stacking photoshop, focus stacking tutorial, focus stacking landscape photography, focus stacking youtube, focus stacking photos, how to focus stack, how to do focus stacking in photoshop, focus stacking in lightroom, focus, focus stacking in photoshop, image stacking, focus shifting, tips and tricks, NikonZ, nikonz, nikon z6, nikon z, nikon z7, nikon z50, nikon mirrorless, nikon z5, nikon d850, nikon camera, nikon z 6

Id: UOIi5KRQsZI

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020