How to Do Focus Stacking in Photoshop - Photoshop Tutorial

hey what's up guys in this video I'll show you exactly how to use focus stacking in Photoshop right after this [Music] hey what's up guys and welcome into the video on this channel we talk landscape photography how you can shoot better photographs taking you out into the field showing you post processing techniques like this video and gear reviews so if you're interested you've never been here before consider subscribing below in this video we're going over focus stacking in Photoshop we're gonna be creating this photograph right here on your screen through the processes of focus stacking using multiple different images shot with different focal distance from the lens now a lot of people use this process for macro photography specifically and it's a really good technique to use for macros because you can stack these focuses and shoot at different focal distance throughout the frame but this can also be a really good technique to use for landscape photography say if you're shooting something at great distances with either a wide-angle or a telephoto something like a 70 to 200 lens you can stack focuses together like if you have trees in a forest and a waterfall in a background you can take different focal distance for the trees and then for the waterfall and stack these focuses together to make sure that you have tack sharp focus throughout the entire photograph and create a stunning landscape photo but right now we're gonna go right onto the screen so you can see how you can achieve focus stacking and Photoshop using the techniques we're going over today alright guys so now that we're on the computer screen we can see the photograph that we're starting with first now this is a series of photographs at different focal distance before we stack them together so in this photograph you can see that the focus is predominantly on the very front petals of this flower and as we scroll through these photographs you can see that the focus changes to different parts of the flower so we can be sure that everything is in tack sharp focus so it goes from front to back focusing on different parts of the flower and we're gonna stack these focuses together and blend them in Photoshop so we're in Lightroom right now if you start in Lightroom all you have to do is load these as layers into Photoshop starting with your first image which is this one right here so we're gonna click on this one and then we're gonna click on our final image which is this one right here so we're stacking five different photographs together now if you don't use a Lightroom you can easily just load these as layers into Photoshop but if you are using Lightroom you bring these over as layers in Photoshop so you're gonna select the first image in the sequence hold down your Shift key and select the last one to select every photograph in the sequence then you right-click and go to edit in open as layers in Photoshop you don't go to open in Photoshop you go to open as layers so these are automatically loaded into an image sequence as layers in Photoshop alright so now once all of the layers are loaded you're gonna see them all over in your layers panel on the right bottom corner of your screen or if you have your layers panel somewhere else it's just going to be stuck in the layers panel itself and you can see all of the photographs that we brought over stacked into a layer sequence now the first thing that I always like to do is make sure that these are lined up perfectly so we're going to align these layers to make sure that in the focus stack we don't have any weird edges that are off from the others so we're just gonna align these layers together and Photoshop is going to use this to find different hard edges and line these up perfectly for us so we're just going to go to edit Auto align layers and the auto technique is probably the best one that I use Photoshop does a really good job of finding these hard edges and aligning the layers so we're just going to click OK and it's going to auto align these lay for us for the focus stack now Photoshop and the focus stack process can be a little intimidating at first but it's actually really simple to do it's pretty much as simple as what we just did with Auto aligning these layers so next thing we're gonna do for the focus stack we're just gonna go to edit and we're going to go to auto blend layers now when the auto blend layers panel comes up you want to be sure that stack images is selected not panorama I also like to select seamless tones and colors and content-aware fill transparent areas the seamless tones and colors blends all the colors together that we're stacking and then the content-aware fill transparent areas are if there's any transparent areas after we've Auto aligned these layers photoshop's gonna basically look for areas that are similar and colors tones edges and autofill those areas now I don't think we're gonna have any of those because we've already Auto aligned these layers but I like to keep that check just in case and once we have stacked images selected and these two options selected we're just gonna hit OK and it's gonna start blending these layers together and it's gonna find these focused areas and combine those bringing them out in certain areas to create our finished photo product so once the focus stack is completed we can see a couple different changes number one the most obvious being that we now have a perfectly in focus flower that we stack together with our different focal distance using the Photoshop focus stack technique and we can zoom in just to be sure we start with this front edge petal of the flower and these first ones are a little bit out of focus but I'm okay with that I didn't get you know this one right in focus when I was in the field shooting I got the very edge of this front one in focus and then we go back through so we start with this one we moved down here to this petal then we move over to this pedal and the middle and we're just checking to see if everything is within focus and it looks like all the pedals throughout are good and in focus and then our main subject we want to make sure as tack sharp is the center bud of the flower itself it looks like everything is in perfect focus thanks to the Photoshop merge and then we have the panels the layers panels has changed a little bit these are layer masks that have been merged together with the Photoshop focus stack and if you look at them we can see the different areas that have been brought into focus in the photograph itself so the different shades that are represented in this are the different parts of the photograph that Photoshop has masked together to bring out those focal distances to be sure that everything is within tack sharp focus basically now all you have to do is go to file save and it's going to save this into your Lightroom catalog if you're using Lightroom and it's going to come up in our Lightroom library and we can just scroll to that real quick and find where it's put it in so here's the photograph that we exported and we can just double click on that finish editing this photograph to make sure it's like perfectly the way we want it to be increase the exposure a little bit increase contrast bring some highlights down bring some shadows up bring whites down and then I like a little bit of black in here as well so I'm actually gonna bring my blacks down to create a little bit more detail I'm gonna bring up the clarity to bring out some detail as well and increase my vibrance and saturation just a little bit just to bring out extra colors that we have and those are just some basic overall edits that you can make to this photograph to make it pop and really bring out all the detail of this focus stack so essentially that's how you focus stack an image using Photoshop it's a very simple process a lot of people get freaked out about Photoshop and all buttons and different ways you can do things but the focus stacking process is really simple as long as you have everything in different focal distances shot in the field brought over is layers to photoshop and then aligned and stack together using the photoshop features that I showed you so if you like this video you found it helpful and you want more Photoshop tutorials go ahead and smash the thumbs up below or consider subscribing to this channel because we come out with these videos all the time on how you can improve your photography using different techniques

Channel: David Johnston

Views: 177,804

Keywords: how to do photoshop focus stacking, how to do focus stacking in photoshop, focus stacking in photoshop tutorial, stacking focus in photoshop tutorial, david johnston photography, photoshop tutorial focus stacking, photoshop tutorial focus stack, focus stack photoshop tutorial, how to do focus stacking for macro photography, how to do focus stacking for landscape photography, focus stacking macro photoshop, how to do focus stacking in photoshop - photoshop tutorial, focus stacking

Id: ifWPtCQIGX0

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018