How I focus stack macro images: Macro flower and water droplet

in today's video I'm gonna show you how I use focus stacking in macro photography to get pin-sharp shots just like this so to start us off what is focus stacking and why is it important well in macro photography even though the subjects that you're taking photos off are very very small it's often the case that if you are focused on the front of that subject the back part might not be in focus if it's a flower it may be that some of your petals aren't always in focus if it's an insect it's maybe that you focused on the eye stalks but then it's back wings aren't in focus so the way that you make sure that your subject is in focus from front to back is by taking multiple different photos in each photo you change that focus point starting at the front and moving to the back and then you combine those images together in Photoshop and hopefully your photo will be nice and sharp the whole way across okay so let me take you through the setup here we've got our subject and for this video I'm just going to be using this small yellow flower which I went and picked yesterday in the rain from a big Bush with lots of these little things I think actually is it's a sort of weed but it flowers quite nicely as you can see I've got this on a clamp just to keep it steady and in my shot a camera here I've got in portrait orientation and I've got it on a tripod to keep it nice and secure I've got the main light is a godox 8200 which I've got to firing through the small collapsible softbox and I've got another 8200 which I've literally just propped up on a battery on this box to cast a little bit of light on this background the good thing is is that this is a really great thing that you can practice at home you know you don't need this is not really a studio setup I've just got my my camera on a tripod and I've got a little flower on a little clamp but you know you could smell the tape a flower to a pencil and stick it in a plant pot or something to have it upright there's any number of ways you can do that and and these lights are just bog-standard godox 8200 speed lights nothing fancy here you don't need to have a roll of paper as a background you can use literally anything or you could not even have a background at all and just have it completely black which I don't love I think the the your subject will get a it I don't know it looks a little bit too studio a little bit I don't know boring I suppose you know having it having something in the background I'm some splash of color does kind of help but it doesn't need to be this it could just be some colorful wallpaper or I mean Christ I could have tried to use this dinosaur print that I've got as my background in fact maybe I should try that in a future video using that creatively in a photo so yeah it's not a difficult setup this is something you could do at your kitchen table on a weekend no problem and it is a great technique to practice so I'm using my Canon one hundred mil macro but I have also got an extension tube on the front of this now what that does is allow me to focus even closer to the front of a lens so you can see how close that flower is yet it's gonna fill the frame and still hopefully be nice and sharp I've talked before about the importance of extension tubes or rather how helpful they can be if you want to get started in macro because yeah I have got quite an expensive macro lens on my camera already but by using those extension tubes you can put them on say like canons nifty 50 and 90 pound 50 mil prime lens and it will turn it into a macro lens you'll suddenly be able to focus much much closer and you can get close-up on those details the great thing is is that these extensions use like 30 pounds off Amazon so it's a really really affordable way of getting started in macro so just taking a look at the flower that I've set up here as you can see we've focused on the stamen in the middle of the flower on that sort of green ball that we've got and that's looking reasonably sharp as a couple of points which are are pretty spot-on but it's very clear that the rest of the flower isn't in focus particularly those petals that are right in the background and also the ones in the foreground with very much got quite a shallow depth-of-field partly because I'm shooting a F 2.8 on this lens and partly because to get a really good bit of macro I'm using a extension tube on that lens to allow me to focus even closer but I don't want a shallow depth of field what I want is everything in focus looking really really pin sharp that's how this flower is going to look really really good so what I'm going to have to do is take those multiple photos focusing across the range of the flower and then piece them together and I'm going to show you exactly how I will do that so to start off I'm going to take my first photo as far back on the flower as possible which means I'm gonna try and focus in right on the back tips of those petals I just want the actual edge of those petals where they meet the background I'm just moving the focus ring until I see those become absolutely pin sharp and when they are that's the point I then take my shot and then zooming in on the back of camera I can see that it is absolutely crystal clear on the top edge of the right one but then as it moves around and comes a little bit closer to the camera that focus does start to fall off it's very clear that the the stamens in the middle are not sharp and of course the petal which is nearer to the camera is completely out of focus it might be a little surprising that there's so much difference in focus when the flower is so small you've got to bear in mind though that while this flower is small it's very close to the lens so the relative distance away from the front petal to the back petal is actually quite a lot certainly enough to completely change the focus point now I'm taking these shots f-14 now that is a very closed down aperture and normally the bigger the aperture number you have the more of your scene is in focus we're still obviously not enough to have the entire flower in focus but it is allowing for more of the image to be in focus each time I take a shot that's just going to help everything blend together a little more easily in Photoshop but crucially what I've got here is my camera on a tripod now that means that the camera isn't moving and nor is our subject everything is very much staying exactly in line in each image so what that means that as I'm changing my focus point on the flower and taking additional shots the flower in the scene isn't really moving around so I can blend those different focuses together in Photoshop and everything should line up really nicely for me when I've done focus stacking this is the only really way that makes sense having everything locked down like this because it allows you to blend things together without having to shift everything around and it's just far far easier so this is the way I do it in studio when I'm doing product photography or macro shots like this where I know that I want everything front to back pin sharp now in one of my earlier macro videos I was out taking photos of insects in the wild and I spoke at length then about how I don't use a tripod and I can't use a focus stacking out in the field now that was for the most part true it's very very difficult to do focus stacking when you don't have a tripod because your cameras moving around your subject might be moving and it just becomes a little bit unfeasible to do that sort of thing strictly speaking you can do handheld focus stacking what you need to do is have your camera on a burst mode and then as you're moving your camera in and out getting the focus just right on the insect you hold down your shutter button keep on firing and move the camera gently forwards and backwards which of course will change your plane of focus it's a little bit more hit and miss than doing it in studio because you're not sure if you've got exactly the images that you need and of course you need to have a very steady hand making sure you do that but what can't really spoil your image of course is that your insect could just leave and I just find more and more that it doesn't really work for me what I prefer to do is have a little bit more artful out of focus your you're choosing exactly where on the insect you want your focus to be usually the eyes of course and then the rest of it can fall a little more into that blurry nice out-of-focus effect but in studio you've got a lot more control so it's much easier to do and it's the only way that you can get that source of pin-sharp or results if you just search macro insect photography on Google you'll see loads of results and you'll see that pin sharp thing maybe it's one of those compound fly's eyes where the whole of it is pinched up there's antennae at pin Chavez wings a pin sharp they've used focus stacking to get that shot and again it may be that some of them have been taken out in the wild with with real flies that could be moving around more often they're been done in studio with unfortunately sometimes it is with dead insects or ones that have been kept in a freezer because as they're cold-blooded if they've been kept cold they move very very slowly they take a lot of time to warm up again as a result that it move around a lot and you can get the shots you need I don't really like doing that I prefer being out literally in a field finding real-life insects and sort of experiencing their world as it were but the other thing that I'm controlling here is their lighting so what I've got set up here is a godox 8200 speed light here with a collapsible softbox on the front now this is set to about 1/8 power and the thing about it is that it isn't moving again this is locked down on a light stand so the distance isn't moving that's gonna mean that my lighting is even on every single shot that I take that is crucial if you're hand holding a light or if you are outside and the Sun goes behind a cloud then its potential that one of your one of your focus images is going to be a completely different exposure to your next one it's going to make it very different to combine everything together in Photoshop and not having it look really weird this way I know that I can take a photo and I can change my focus point take another and the exposure is going to be absolutely identical on every single one I always use Live View for this source of work because you can digitally zoom into your scene make sure that your focus is exactly where you want it to be in this case it's on different parts of the petals so I've got that one and then i zoom in getting slightly closer each time just slightly twisting that wheel and again moving it forwards and as I do I can see that the focus is being brought forward literally moving over that flower so I know that everything is starting to become nice and sharp in the middle at this point each time it's just a very small micro adjustment on the focus just a tiny little turn because what I don't want is for any parts to be left out of focus the point is is that every single bit is absolutely pin sharp so you don't want to make big focus adjustments you want to do tiny little tweaks and take lots of photos it's much better to have more photos with subtle focus shifts than to have maybe two or three images where you may have actually missed a whole section and you're going to find it very very difficult to go back and retake just that shot you'd need you'd basically have to start from scratch so we're getting very close to the to the lens at this point we're almost at the tiny front tip of the petal closest to the camera which means we're nearly done so now I think I've got my first focus stack shots in the bag I want to try and do something a little bit more creative and I'm trying to basically get a shot of the flower with a really nice water drop coming off look like it's outside just after a a little rain shower so the way I'm doing this though is I firstly I've changed my camera to a portrait orientation and I framed it up so that we've got a nice view of one of the petals sort of slightly bending down and into that petal which is going to have the drop that's coming off my lighting setup hasn't changed I've still got the softbox here and I've still got my background light which is giving me a nice shot overall it's definitely a studio shot because it got that gradient on the background because of that light but the way that we're getting the water droplets on is I've actually got a little cup of glycerin now this is completely clear like water but it's very thick it's more like a syrup so it's it's quite easy for me to use these little tweezers just dip it in you get a little globule on the end and I just sort of put that into the middle of the flower couple of these drops and then I wait and eventually it starts to drip down onto the petal and then it will create a big bubble of this liquid which will then hopefully drip off in quite a nice way once you put the stuff on there it's all about timing you've got to make sure that you get your shot exactly as that drip comes down and it really is trial and error I've tried a few of these already and I'm probably gonna try a few more just to get that perfect shot missed it okay try again load some more up I want ideally the drop just coming away from the petal still in frame and maybe attached to the to the flower still but I definitely want it dropping further away the reason I'm using glycerin rather than water is because it's thicker it firstly it travels a little bit more slowly so it's easier it is slightly easier to photograph than just using pure water but also because of its its thicker viscosity it creates more of these thicker globules which just looks a lot more attractive to photograph you get nicer highlights on it whereas water wouldn't have quite the same effects that we're going for okay I've got big one coming now I missed it again my reactions I'm I'm firing slightly too late to get the nice drip effect so we're gonna keep on going put a little bit more and wait for the drip quick quick quick we've got a drip coming which I missed doing this sort of stuff outside with maybe with with a bit of wind or with anything which is causing this stuff to move around is very tricky so this is really a studio project but it's fun I'm enjoying it okay here we go that's it that's the one I wanted that is exactly what I wanted we've got this awesome droplet of liquid coming down but it's connected by the Strand up to the up to the flower that looks amazing but I still want the flower nice and sharp sand now I've got that shot I'm gonna focus that the rest of the flower quickly just make sure that everything else is absolutely pin sharp and we've got another globule coming down now that one's even better that's the one I want that is absolutely perfect and that globule of water is sharper than the previous one that is perfect that is exactly what I wanted from this shot okay so now I've got my focus stack and I've got my creative water droplet shot let's go and take those into Photoshop and see what we can do with them so I've moved over to Lightroom imported my shots and it's this composition actually which is the one that I want to work on are really like the way of the flower moves up and I particularly like that we were able to catch that water droplet it looks super cool I'm really really pleased with how it's come out I've had a quick look through and I think actually we can achieve the depth of field and the sharpness that we want with these four images we have a close look this is sharp night on this pet petal this one however is nice and sharp on the back petals so hopefully that's giving us enough information to blend everything together so let's start off by selecting these and we're gonna go edit in open as layers in Photoshop okay so we're over in Photoshop now and we can see that we've got our layers down in the bottom right hand corner all ready to go so what I think I'm gonna do though is I'm going to turn off the what is going to be our bottom layer which is let's just have a quick look is to layer it with the water drop because I'm not going to try and include the water drop shot in the focus stack because I think it might confuse Photoshop a little bit because there's nothing else to make the water drop in focus what we need to focus is that plant the flower and we should be able to get that from the other images so that's just them turn everything back on and we're going to select the top three and first of all we're gonna go to edit and we're going to go Auto align layers because there was a little bit of movement between those just my hand being on there on the camera or the focus focus barrel does shift things around a little bit so that has just brought everything back in as we can see there is this little problem around the edge which means that it did have to move shots to get them lined up now the lined up would go back to edit and this time we're go to auto blend click stack images and click OK so this point you just have a big slip of coffee while you're waiting for Photoshop to do it hmm good beans okay so apparently we have some issues now Photoshop for the most part is usually pretty good at focus stacking when I've done focus stacks of maybe watches with twenty or so different different images it's been able to do a pretty good job here though it's apparently been very confused and it's it's move things around and I don't know what's going on there's ghosting there's all kinds of things as there's black back here in the background you know there was no black background on any of them so I really don't know what is going on there it's very confusing the problem is is that these masks are very complicated there's lots going on and I think it would take probably quite a long time to try and manually go in and just select the areas that we want so there is another piece of software that I use which I use on some of my professional shoots because it is a professional piece of software for focus stacking and it's called he leakin focus and I have just in case loaded up those those images already in here they can focus is the exact same ones including the wrong with the droplet down here so what we're gonna do is see whether he Lacan focus can do a better job so let's say we'll just click render it will do its thing much quicker than Photoshop and also as we can see infinitely more accurately than Photoshop was able to do so we can just have a quick zoom in here and you can see as we move around we can see on the left was an original single file and on the right is how it's managed to combine everything and as we can see it's pin-sharp across the board across the whole flower the rear petals are sharp the front petals are sharp that statement in the middle sharp one of the things that we do have though that I don't want is some ghosting here because that leaf will have moved because of the weight of the the water droplet on it but with also we've got as we can see the water droplet dripping down and the water droplets on the petal we don't need both so what I'm going to do is if I click this one or maybe that one I suppose is the one that's bringing in and we'll go to retouching copy parts from source image two resulting image oh okay okay so what we're going to do we've selected the one with the water droplet because that's what we want and using this brush we can then brush into our final image more of the water droplet image it'll probably make a little more sense when I do this now we are losing a little bit of that sharpness because we're we are removing one of the stacked images but we don't need to do all of it we just take it just that much in fact I'm gonna undo that so okay by taking us back to our stacked image because we don't want to get I don't want to try and maintain as much of this sharpness around this part of the petal as possible so I'm only gonna try and brush in the bits that we actually need and I think when we look at the image in full screen you won't be able to tell everything still looks pin-sharp the water droplets sharp the leaf is sharp everything else in this shot is now pinned sharp which is perfect so now we can just go to save so save that as a tiff image and then in Photoshop I'm gonna load that back up and there's our shot and if we just have a look at how Photoshop tried to stack that image it's all over the place haven't got all this ghosting and everything and then here is how he Lacan focus has done the exact same thing with the exact same source files it is much much better and I think it's only about fifty pounds for a year if you do a lot of macro you really want to get into that sort of photography it's definitely a piece of software which is worth investing in because trying to try to mask out just those bits in Photoshop to do it as accurately would be very very time-consuming and certainly if you're working on you know here maybe not too bad with only three or four images but if you're a focus stack of say an insect and you've taken 40 images and with each one is just a tiny slither of focus moving back it would just take so long and I suspect that no matter how long you spend you probably wouldn't be able to do as accurate a job as this has done either way that's brought us then to this shot so we're still a bit more what I want to do just to neaten things up first of all I want a different crop I'm just gonna clear that ratio doesn't really like it and I'm gonna move it in move it down here something like that I think looks really nice with this water droplet perfectly down in this obeying the rule of thirds appearing in the bottom right a third click okay that's already I think that's looking great first thing I'm gonna do though is I'm going to go into filter and Camera Raw filter so it's gonna bring up the same controls that you would get in Lightroom for some easy global edits it's a little bit of a dim side so I'm gonna brighten it up I'm gonna boost the shadows or maybe drop the shadows a little bit actually bring back those highlights on the flower just a little bit the whites we could give a little boost because I want this I want the flower to be vibrant and noticeable and summery I don't want it to be too shadowy and hidden away to that end I'm gonna boost the clarity just a little bit and we're gonna boost the texture as well because that is gonna help ABS that sharpness and that that texture which which is going to make it stand out which is the whole reason why we've done the focus stacking D haze I don't think I really want to do anything with D haze at this point maybe actually up it just a touch but then in the hue saturation luminance tab I am gonna play the hues a little bit I'm gonna try and drop those yellows just a little bit I'm gonna bring the greens up to make it a little bit more of an emerald green because at the moment it's really sort of a yellowy green it gets lost in amongst those other petals so by bringing it up it makes it a more vibrant vivid green stands out against those yellows we can darken it down slightly something like that it's a little bit over the board so I'm going to reduce that saturation the background color I really like I like the the yellow and the purple I think that's a good color combination so I am gonna try and bring up the brightness a touch it's not a lot I can do with it but you know ramping that right up to the max seems to be okay and actually I'm gonna do the same with the magenta as well I'm also going to bring up the yellows and that I think is about it so I'm just gonna I'm gonna hit okay and apply those changes if we can see is brighten things up a lot but I'm gonna brighten it a little bit more with a levels adjustment I'm gonna bring those mid-tones up but we're gonna bring those highlights down just a touch and maybe down on that just to bring back a little bit more contrast something like that okay I'm just gonna merge that levels layer down cuz I don't think I want to tweak that at all but now using the Spot Healing Brush I'm gonna go through and just do a little bit of clean-up on the flower itself because it was sitting overnight and so it has sort of degraded a little bit from when I picked it and I don't think it was brand new when I got it so ever a few of these little blemishes which I just want to take care of I'm here couple of these dark a little lines and also there's a couple of little bits of hair and dust which is fallen on it while it's been in my studio just helps make it look a little bit more polished a little bit more like a professional studio macro shot sister of attention to detail which can separate a mediocre amateur looking shop from something much more high-end you want to zoom in so you can really see that detail and really see what you're doing and the Healing Brush does make it very easy to just click around and get rid of what you don't want I don't want to go overboard you know and these highly specular highlights look really nice these little dots because it really shows that there's nice it's like a wax enos to the leaves and shows that they're they're wet which of course if there's a if there's a water droplet coming off then they would be wet so that's good but there's a couple of patches in here as well that I'm not too keen on and but even at this zoom level it's clear that he leaked on focus has done a really superb job with this focus tack I'm not really seeing any kind of errors that I'd need to be aware of I think I didn't take a shot which was perfectly sharp right on this front edge and fortunately so that is a little bit soft but it's not too bad I don't mind it really okay we have got a little of a problem round here as you can see there's this sort of haloing it is it is subtle and I didn't notice it when it was right out but what we can do if we just bring in a levels adjustment and really ramp up that brightness it's only temporary don't worry it allows us to see exactly where that error is so what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate that layer and I'm going to use the clone stamp tool slightly smaller size and a slightly higher flow and we're just going to clone stamp in some of that color and hopefully it's gonna look okay when we take off that levels adjustments this should be fairly easy we just needs a paint in that same color without going too close to the petal itself I'm gonna make it a harder brush and smaller and it should just let us paint away that slight error that we don't want some of these are very subtle but you know while we're doing it we may as well do it properly this is check the other edges everything else looks fine that's alright don't mind that down here a little bit so I'm gonna use a smaller brush I'm going to take a sample from over here and paint that in and maybe without that levels adjustment we wouldn't even notice that but you know never hurts to do it anyway so we just take that levels off then know that basically just you can't tell anyway so I think we're okay and if we go back and have a look at this as we can see it's yeah that's pretty much pretty much taken care of so go back out fit on screen I think I did notice a couple of yep marks on our background paper so again I'm going to bring out a spot removal tool and just paint over those and they're gonna disappear because I want a really nice neat looking background and those little spots might be noticeable and a great way of finding them is by moving your canvas around by holding spacebar and dragging with your mouse and as I do I can see that there is quite a big patch here and here a little bit so I'm gonna right-click on the Spot Healing Brush tool selects the patch tool and then roughly draw around it and literally drag it to a new place deselect and looks like that's pretty much taking care of the other ones are too subtle I can't be bothered doing anything with those maybe that a little bit I do tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist of this with this sort of thing I you might never need to go to this much detail if you in commercial work and this was for a client then absolutely you would want to go to this much effort to clean up your shop but if it's just for your own work then it doesn't matter but then if it's for your own work then you know take all the time you need you know you're not working to deadlines you're not trying to get work out for an advertising schedule or anything like that you can spend as long as you need cleaning it up and you should do a couple of bits on the water droplet there's that little reflection a couple of little bits I want it to look nice and clean so I'm gonna take out some of these I'm going to take out this I think that was reflecting my lights maybe yeah we don't want too much it makes it a little bit of a complicated reflection on what I want is for it to be pretty pretty pretty neat and even let's just have a quick look at that yeah so what I'm gonna what I'm gonna do zoom in a little bit more I'm gonna create a new I'm gonna know I'm not gonna create a new layer audio on a new layer and then take a sample of that should just be black and with the brush tool smaller size we're just gonna paint over this sort of gray reflection I like this strong highlight on the right I don't like that sort of weird grey in the middle but up here it blends to the purple that's really really nice so I think just taking rid getting rid of that little bit it looks really great and if we have a look at when suddenly we've got a much cleaner looking water globule in fact if we zoom in and just turn it off and on yeah sudden in when it's on we can see all these reflections of the studio we don't like it without it it's really clean and it looks great we still get the reflection of the purple in the background and I'm here and then we get this nice highlight the rest of it is fine I just think that looks a lot better and a lot more as I say like a polished sort of shot but I want to emphasize this water droplet a little bit more the way I'm going to do that is by duplicating this background layer again going to filter going to Camera Raw filter and I'm going to if you'll bear with me add in some clarity add in some texture add in some highlights maybe some shadows and maybe a bit of white as well now if we click OK then we're gonna see that the image is gone very crunchy and it's not a good look for the whole picture but that's fine because what I'm doing is I'm gonna use a adjustment so I'm not I'm going to use a layer mask invert it so it's black which means it's not applying anywhere and now if I paint with white it's going to reveal that layer is gonna reveal the clarity and the texture that we've just put on in the Camera Raw filter so now we can just literally go in paint in that effect onto our water droplet which is going to boost those highlights is gonna emphasize that bit of clarity that we use I should do it if we turn that off and on again it's subtle but it does make a difference in the whole image but actually think I could make it brighter as well so I'm gonna use a levels adjustment I'm gonna bring up that mid-tone I'm gonna bring up the highlights to actually quite a bit and again invert that layer mask we don't want it applying to everything I'm gonna paint it back in selectively I'm just those bits that we want use a smaller brush paint it up here not going on the leaf this time because it will make the yellow too bright and we don't want that I'm painting it around the highlights knitting it around all parts of our droplet turn that off and back on suddenly that purple really stands out and when you look at it in a full-screen it looks great it looks really really good your eye is drawn to it I think yeah I'm very very pleased with how that looks actually but I'm gonna go back into another camera raw and the way I'm going to do that is by holding alt or command layer and merge visible and that's going to merge everything onto a new layer which I can then go to filter Camera Raw filter and we're back in here and I'm gonna up those whites first of all and maybe the exposure generally cuz it stood a little bit dark highlights gonna touch down I actually am gonna add a bit more clarity to the whole scene but not texture if we add texture then it starts to go you know very weird and almost like peeper don't want that it's gonna keep our texture exactly where it was and at this point I haven't decided what health I want to do it is a case as I often do with these things is about looking at it thinking what else do I really want to get from this shot and I think one thing that I want to do is I want to add in a I want to add a graduated filter down here darkening up just hopefully it's gonna draw the eye a little bit more to the middle of the frame and then maybe another one on the top edge and then I think maybe using an adjustment brush I am gonna bring the exposure down just a bit on that bit of leaf because it was the bit that was nearest my flash and the way that it's been angled it's just catching all of the light from that flash so it's brighter than the rest of the flowers so by bringing them exposure down just a little bit it's just help balancing it out if you look without it's very very bright and then we just bring it back down to those tones match a little bit more the rest of the flower for that's everything that I want to do with that right now I'm going to press okay and as I say everything's kind of gone back a little bit I think that looks a lot better one thing I do want to try though is just doing a bit of dodging and burning to try and bring out a little bit more of the texture in the center of the flower so I'm going to do that by creating a new layer edit fill and fill with 50% gray now we've got a great screen we then use a overlay blending mode and what that allow us to do is if we paint with white then it lightens the image if we paint with black it darkens the image obviously those are very extreme examples so what we do is we use a very very low flow that's going to allow us to just build up that effect the more we paint on so I want to do that around here adding in some extra shadow to where there already is some shadow but we don't really have enough so by painting some extra shadow in its hopefully going to give a little bit more texture to this middle bit of the flowers gonna suggest shadow a little bit more it's gonna let these green things stand out in a way that they also blend together into one at the moment and I don't really love that I'd like them to have a little bit more definition and this is the way you were going to do it swap to white and paint white on those highlights to help bring those out and whilst we've got our whites up we're gonna do the same on some of these panels slightly bigger brush painting in some extra detail on these leaves a little bit dark a little bit shady I want to bring out a little bit more well this really doing is adding a little bit more shadow weather already is shadow a little bit more highlights where there already is highlights so it's basically adding a little bit of contrast but it helps define things a little bit more and you have a bit more control over how to do it in my experience there's no real right or wrong way to do it you can very much overdo it but even then you know you can dial it back because it's on a new layer so you can just take that opacity down or just get rid of it altogether but I found it a very good way of just painting in the light a little bit more where you want it to be also hopefully using it here choose to take control of some of these highlights a little bit and just keep those under control maybe even swap it around and add in a bit more brightness some of these parts and we've already added a lot of brightness too to the droplet so we don't want to go nuts there and fitch on-screen if we just turn that off and on we can see particularly in the green in the middle it's adding a lot more texture so I really really like what that's doing it might be a little bit too much and it's gonna bring it down to at 80% 70% just to make it a bit more subtle but I think I'm pretty pleased with that overall so I think I'm going to call it a day on this shot here I've got pretty much everything I want I really like that the flower itself is so sharp front to back yeah there's a couple of little errors but I'm overall very pleased with that and having that water droplet I think really transforms his shot into something much more exciting because I didn't intend to have the water droplet there when I started shooting but it's just a thought I had as I was as I was getting some of my test shots I'm really glad that I experimented with it and I took the time to to get the timing just right so that it's coming off but you still get that nice globe of water which yeah I think I think transforms this shot from what would just be a pretty boring picture of a flower into something with a lot more dynamism going on so yeah definitely something that's worth experimenting with if you are wanting to take some creative macro shots at home but hopefully this has been a helpful video hopefully you've learned some techniques about how to do your own focus stacking as I say do look into he leaked on focus if this is something that you think you're gonna be doing a lot of it's a very very good piece of software very high-end pro software and for 50 quid a year it's actually not too bad if you have found this video helpful do please please hit that like button subscribe if you don't already and I will see you next time [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 32,749

Keywords: Macro, Photography, Tutorial, Flower, Water droplet, Focus stacking, Helicon, Photoshop, Lightroom, Lighting, lens, Focus tubes

Id: 9p1ODqqGek0

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020