Macro focus stack and editing tutorial: Photoshop and Lightroom ideas and tips

in today's video i'm going to show you how i use lightroom and photoshop to create beautiful macro images just like this so in last week's video i actually showed you how i took these shots i was out on location in scotland i was using my macro lens i was using my lighting to create what i hoped were quite dreamy quite dramatic macro images there are shots that i'm really proud of but i only showed you half the story i only showed you how i went out and actually took the shots and of course the second half is actually about the editing how you take those raw files and create something even more beautiful from them and that's what i'm going to show you today i'm going to show you how i focus stack my shot and then how i applied my edits over the top to create pin sharp images that i think look pretty good so let's start off and we'll take a look at the raw files in lightroom these are the ones i'm going to do is this nice shot of this lovely mushroom i was lighting this from the side you can see the light hitting the mushroom on the left hand side but you can see that we've got a focus point right at the front of the mushroom here on these close-up fins and as a result the rest of it is out of focus the stem is out of focus the back of the mushroom is out of focus and that isn't what i really want from this shot what i want is to get the whole thing in focus now i was shooting this at i think um f 5.6 and you might think well if you just shot at f 16 or f 22 then you'll get the whole thing in focus and while that is true you'll also get a lot more of the background in focus and what i wanted to do is use a wider aperture to make sure that i'm separating that mushroom from its background but by using focus stacking you still keep the mushroom actually nice and sharp so the shots that i took i took eight in total and as you can see if we just go through this one's focusing at the back and it's getting sturdily closer towards the front until everything is nice and sharp i did a couple of run-throughs i think just to make sure that everything was was pin sharp this one right at that front edge is really really sharp but obviously it falls um into outer focus in the background at some point one of these ones maybe it was this one nope maybe one of these one of these the actual stem itself is nice and this one here we go look at that pin shot detail on the actual stem of the um or the trunk stem of the mushroom looks pin sharp so this is great so we've got our photos in lightroom i'm just going to start off ignore that i'm just going to start off by applying a couple of little tweaks to the white balance something that we can do in camera first of all i'm going to cool it down i'm also going to increase that magenta a little bit i'm just going to slightly bring down the highlights a tiny amount -10 slightly increase our shadows before and after before and after that's just correcting some of that color cast which i didn't really love the look of now that's done on the one photo i press shift select the rest right click on that first image develop settings and then sync settings just check all synchronize and then that will just paste those settings across all of those photos you need to make sure that you've got the same settings on every photo otherwise when you come to blend them together you'll be blending a bit of a mushroom that's one color with another one that's another and it won't quite work out exactly as you want to this way they're all the same photo so now with them all still selected i right click we go edit in and down here open as layers in photoshop and this will usually just take a small amount of time to load all of those images as a layer so have a coffee handy okay so we're there this is all of the images stacked down here on the right um so let's start off by selecting them all by holding shift and clicking selecting all of our layers and we'll go to edit auto align layers now i didn't use a tripod for this so there was some movement my camera was literally just sort of balanced on the floor i think maybe i sort of put my coat under it i can't quite remember um so there is a little bit of movement between each shot and even if you're using a tripod you can still get a little bit of movement there can still be some slight tweaks in the frame as you change your focus so aligning those layers is just a very very good starting point it just makes sure that everything is perfectly lined up and as you can see it has had to shift some of the frames slightly to line them up so we do have this um sort of odd line around the outside but that's fine we're going to crop in and get rid of that no problem first of all though we need to do the actual stack the actual focus blend and so we go to auto blend layers make sure that stack images is ticked and we press ok ok there we go there is our focus stacked image and actually photoshop has done a really really good job with this one it's combined all of those lovely sharp layers we've got all of those fins nice and in focus from the front to the back including the stem and this is exactly what i mean about not using like f22 we've kept that that lovely depth of field so all of that background is completely blurred out and it's that that's helping the mushroom really stand out in this image but we've stacked it up so that actually the whole mushroom is in focus as well so it works really nicely so i'm just going to deselect that edge and actually at this point as well i'm just going to go to layer and i'm going to flatten the image we don't need all those layers now our focus stack is done it looks great and so we can basically just consider this our starting point for the edit as always i duplicate my background layer so that i've got that original file to go back to let's just have a zoom in and have a little look it's done a really really good job there's loads of detail on here there's the odd little spot like there's a slight strip here if you can see where it isn't quite in focus i think maybe i just didn't take quite as many shots as i should have so maybe i'm slightly missed these fins being in focus so that's that's a little bit of a shame so that's more on me even is on photoshop so um that's fine and there's a little bit of sort of ghostly blurring around here and a little bit here but honestly i don't really think it's anything that you'd ever notice if you look at that full screen i don't think you particularly noticed that i'm not bothered i don't think it's a real problem for my shot what i do want to do though is address a lot of this sort of general detritus that's fallen onto the mushroom because i do find it quite distracting and i did try and get rid of some of this when i was actually shooting but for the most part i end up finding that by trying to sort of gently brush off these little bits of dirt and fallen leaves and stuff you can end up damaging the mushrooms so in this instance i didn't want to go too far and i'd rather try and take care of that in photoshop instead but of course it's very easy to do i'm going to take my spot healing brush use a small brush size and you can just click over on these pieces of dirt photoshop does its business just magically removes it now there is of course an argument about what you should or should not remove from a shop particularly a natural shop and for me i don't mind removing this kind of thing because this is dust and dirt which has fallen on it this is not a permanent part of uh part of the image um it's not like i'm taking out another mushroom or even worse adding in another one in order to um to create a fake scene this is like dust and dirt that i could have brushed off but i'd just rather do that in post in order to protect uh the mushroom itself in order to not damage it um both for my own shot and also i just don't want to damage nature i don't want to damage the things i've seen there so um i think this is a fair game there's probably plenty of photographers who would argue with me on that um but you can let me know your thoughts your preference um in the comments if you think i'm going too far by taking this stuff out basically this is just a case of going around clicking on these areas with the spot healing brush takes a while but the longer you spend the better of a job it will you'll come out with so without boring you for hours on end i'm going to skip ahead until we've pretty much finished the cleanup so i've done most of the cleanup on the top of the mushroom if we just turn that off and on you can see the difference before it's covered in dust and dirt and bits of debris and whatnot and now it's much cleaner we still got a couple of things that i do want to address though we've got this sort of big hanging little bit of dead leaf on the back and over here we've got another little bit of something falling over there so so the way i'm going to address this is by using the clone stamp tool i'm going to start by taking a reading over here by pressing command or alt and clicking and then dragging that over here lining it up and we're just going to start painting in this replacing this bit of mushroom with this bit of mushroom now it doesn't line up exactly just yet but bear with me because we're going to come back and just about going over and over redoing lots of these little bits until it all sort of fits together as it were it's definitely easier ways to do this but this is just the way i do it okay so i'm happy enough with how the actual line of the back of that mushroom looks it is not great i would normally take a lot more time over it make it much neater but it's fine you get the idea you go over and over again until you've kind of got it how you want but we do have this now sort of patch of green that's all a little bit muddy that doesn't quite work with the rest so i'm going to take a bigger brush size something like this i'm going to reduce the flow so that less of the effect is applied each time take a reading from over here and gently sort of paint over here and then one from over here over here just about blending it back in with its background take lots of different readings and just by building up and up you kind of get to a point where you probably wouldn't tell that there was something there before unless you flick it on and off like this but when we go back and look at full screen i don't think you'd have any idea so that's how i would take care of that and i'm going to do the exact same thing using this little bit on the other side something like that i think it looks a lot better and i'm also just going to go in i'm just going to take off this little bit and this just to help separate give a little more distance between the mushroom and that i think with that it was just almost interfering with the mushroom a little bit too much i didn't quite like it that's the cleanup and already i think just by doing the focus stack and the cleanup we've taken a raw image that was nice enough and we've already made it much more professional looking much more interesting i think this would catch your eye in a way that maybe one of the raw files wouldn't quite so much but it's at this point on when i'm going to start actually applying some different colors i'm going to start doing what i call like the main edit when it gets its real look and most of that work if not pretty much all of it is going to be done with the camera raw filter so let's start by duplicating this layer again and i'm gonna go to filter camera raw filter now the camera raw filter basically has the exact same controls that you would find in lightroom it's basically lightroom within photoshop but because it's within photoshop you can actually work with it in layers and you can apply things in different ways and you can create looks that you could never achieve with just lightroom alone so photoshop is incredibly powerful for that reason and one of the things i always do like to start off when i'm kind of looking for the look that i want for an image is go through some of my presets now i say this every time i work with presets don't be afraid of using them don't think that it's a cheats or that it's fake photography that you just one click and apply another photographer's look that is the case i think if you maybe just one click apply and then consider your image done but that isn't what we're gonna do here the way i like to work with with them with presets is to use them as great inspiration it's a really good jumping off point um in this instance you can go through and i really like these colder looks i really like i love the kind of blue that we've got in here oh i really love the deep emerald green that we're getting from from this one and you can kind of go through and you might take your image in a completely different direction i love this it's a9 raw what it's doing to the image but the way that i'm to work i'm going to first of all we're going to go with asics raw half and i'm going to go back to the standard controls like the ones you'd find in in lightroom i'm going to bring those highlights down slightly and bring the shadows down as well because at the moment if we go too high everything becomes a little bit hdr it loses some of that nice drama that i created by using the light so i don't want all those shadows to be visible i want some real depth i'm going to bring them down minus 30 i think looks nice um that's pretty much it the saturation has been brought down slightly by that preset and i like that but i'm going to change the colors even more in the color mixer now i do a lot of my work in the color mixer by changing the hue saturation luminance of those individual colors so start off by grabbing the yellow hue let's bring that down let's just pulse it up and down because where it was before if you look on top of the mushroom in particular up around here it's kind of a sickly yellowy green and i don't really want that what i want is a much more deep tone a more orangey tone so as i pulse that up and down you can see what it's doing it's taking it from green yellow into orangey yellow we don't want to go too far down here is a little bit much but somewhere around -30 i think is perfect and those greens to balance it out i actually want to take much higher up i want to take that into plus 30. now right now i think that those greens look very very fake they look very over saturated so i'm going to go into the saturation bring those greens right down like far down really fast somewhere around minus 60 even so we've got that nice kind of emeraldy color but it isn't so overpowering in the scene let's go to our luminance now i could maybe add a little bit of a you know what i don't think it needs any brightness to the greens maybe plus five those yellows just a touch what about the orange the oranges i'm going to slightly bring down i don't really think there's much of anything else i don't imagine there's a lot of blue i was a little bit on the stem i don't imagine there's a lot of purple or magenta either no that's fine let's go to our hues again and with the orange i'm going to bring it down just a touch if you go too far it goes pink it goes weird i don't like it but again just that little hint can add a lovely sort of warming glow over here in these fins and i think that's really nice maybe a little bit less minus minus 18 somewhere around there so already i think that's looking really nice i'm going to press ok and immediately if we turn that off and on you can see just the huge amount of difference but it's made using that camera raw filter and those are controls that you can use use in lightroom this is nothing that you can't do in lightroom but this is a good starting point again as i say because what i'm going to do now is duplicate this layer again so we've got all these different layers going on now i'm going to go back into camera raw filter and we're going to go back into our presets and we're going to have a look and see what it looks like with a different one applied now i remember really liking the look of a5 with that blue but also really light a9 now right now on here as you can see when we hover over a9 it looks far too much it looks very contrasty very dark and it is but that's fine because what we're going to do is take that opacity down from 100 and we're going to go right down to zero right back to just what the effects we'd applied before now we can slowly build up that opacity and just dial in the amount of that preset that we want you can't do that in lightroom in lightroom when you work in presets you apply one preset and that's it but by working in layers in photoshop like this you can build up your effect you can stack presets on top of each other as many as you want you can change the opacity you can change the color tone of them and so you're working with with technically with presets someone else's presets but you're using them in a way that creates a completely unique image that is nothing like what those presets would be achieving with anyone else's photos because you're using them in a completely new way and that is why i really like working with presets in photoshop i think in this case just adding that little hint it's changing the contrast it's giving an extra little kick on the stem here i like that a lot so that's just at 32 percent opacity that layer there the great thing is now we can merge that layer down and so we've now got all of those effects being applied but at 100 so we duplicate it again and then we can go back into filter and camera raw filter and we can go back into our presets and start having another look and we can apply some apply some more on top like i really like the kind of brown tones of this i really like the blue of this yeah we can do lots of things not supposed to go black and white but actually you get the idea of how we would apply those kinds of things and i'm actually not going to apply another preset at this point i mean i do really like the the blue of this but i'm going to show you how i would apply that in a different way and that is by using the color grading tool this is something that's relatively new into lightroom and into photoshop it allows you to add different color tones selectively to your shadows or to your highlights in this case i do want to add some blue into our shadows quite a bit and i want a fairly dark blue so you can do this in two ways you can have a drag this little circle around the more you the closer to the edge you get the more saturation and then you can change the hue like this what i like to do is just sort of get to this point and then i can decide on exactly the hue i want and in this one i do want a very deep blue i don't want a cyan tone because it adds a little bit i don't know it's just not quite right i feel that it needs this sort of rich blue and almost a magenta blue so somewhere around here i think looks really nice i'm going to take the saturation down i think it's a little bit much but we can also slightly bring up the luminance it gives it that little bit of a filmic fade by having those kind of lighter shadows and then if we go into our highlights because i know that there's a lot of highlight on here and on here i can maybe add a little bit of extra warmth so we can go here and just add in you know you can see what that's doing here change our hue a little bit a little bit less without it i think it's it just needs a little bit of something but we don't need as much as we put in the shadows i think around 10 saturation is all that needs if we press ok on that look at what that's done it's added these gorgeous blue tones it's giving it much more of a cinematic look i really really like how this image is looking now it's pretty much everything that i think i would want to do but the last thing i do want to try and i don't necessarily think i'm going to keep it but i just want to have a look is apply something called the orton effect and i've talked about this plenty of times in landscapes it applies a lovely sort of um sort of dreamy haze to your image and that can look really really nice and it can look beautiful for macro images it gives it that kind of fairy tale feel um i don't necessarily know if i want to do this but i want to show you the steps you might take and then we'll decide whether or not we want to keep it but we'll start off by duplicating the layer again and with this one we're going to go adjustments levels ramp up that brightness ramp down this one get this really high contrast image you know we're thinking looks awful we clip that levels layer to this background layer so it's only applying to this top layer then we go filter blur gaussian blur and we apply a lot of blur and it looks terrible but here's where the magic happens grab that opacity ramp it back to zero and it's gone and then you just apply a few percent and watch as we build up that effect look at this haze we're getting i'll zoom in a little bit and just turn that off and on look at that it's not it's not doing a lot but it's just adding this lovely dreamy haze to our image which i think for this kind of shop can look really really nice it quickly can get out of hand look at that at 30 percent it's gone very very weird and dreamy it looks like a digital effect that's being applied but i think somewhere around maybe just five percent it might be too subtle to even tell but it's just giving that slight soft feel to it and sometimes that's why i like to use it because digital cameras with their high resolutions can sometimes look really over sharp and sometimes adding in this effect can just soften an image soften some of those harsh details and i think that's exactly what it's done here turn off and on off and on i think that looks really really nice and that is everything that i want to do to this image we have taken this all the way if we turn these layers off this was our pretty much our original shot we've done the focus stack but we've got all this debris detritus over the top we've cleaned that up by using the spot removal tool and using the clone stamp tool it's given it a much more polished professional look then we've gone in with some of our color grading then we've gone in with some additional color grading and we've added in those blues into the shadows and then finally we've added our autumn effect and overall i think that's a really really nice looking image i do hope that it's been helpful to see how i would go about taking my raw files on location through to seeing how i would stack them together to get my pin shot focus and then to apply my look on top if you have enjoyed this video do please hit that like button consider subscribing to my channel if you don't already and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 21,572

Keywords: Macro, Photography, Tutorial, Ideas, Editing, Tips, Lightroom, Photoshop, Focus, Stacking, Beginner, Presets

Id: _TxWNWuToeU

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021