Nikon Z6 Focus Shift Shooting Feature for Focus Stacking Macro

it's filth h-here and today i'm going to demonstrate focus shift shooting which is something that came out nikon introduced it on the D 850 and they also have it on the z7 and then it came out as well on the z6 where I will demonstrate it for you now using my z6 what we're gonna work on is macro photography with focus stacking before my z6 if I wanted to do a focus stack image I had to mount my camera on this rail and then I would take an exposure and crank this and take another exposure and crank this and it would actually move the camera itself I wasn't you wasn't capable of moving the focus and exact amount but I could get pretty close with this focus rail so as you can see here with focus shift shooting the camera actually makes a shot and adjust the focus ever so slightly and then makes another shot and another shot you can program as many shots as you'd like up to 300 and you can also change the amount of focus distance between each shot it's a really cool feature have a studio set up here on my kitchen table this is a rose I got my girlfriend for Valentine's Day and here it is March the 3rd and it's still alive and kicking and even has some new growth on it so she's gonna try to route that thing with in the meantime we're gonna try to get a picture of it there's a little bit of brown on it but not much but I've got it propped up here and I've got some light on it from the left I've got a cellphone light on it from behind I've got another cellphone light on it from a different angle in the front so I've got lots of light on it and I've got a I've got a blue backdrop which will probably black out completely in the picture but let's shoot it I'm shooting tonight with the Nikon 200 to 500 f 5.6 which is not your typical macro lens but I think it might work I have the FTZ adapter and my nikon z6 all mounted on a tripod I'm going to use 1/8 of a second f11 and ISO 100 I have the flower in focus pretty much using the closest point on the flower and what I'm going to do because the focus shifting goes actually said this wrong in the original video so I'm correcting it with a voiceover the focus shifting starts close to you and as it adjusts focus it goes further and further away so I adjusted the focus slightly closer to make sure I didn't miss anything okay so I'm going to start it focused right there so after you push menu and go to the shooting menu which has the icon of the camera you can scroll through the menus and the next-to-last thing on it its focus shift shooting there's one more page that just has silent photography so there's focus shift shooting click OK and I have my number of shots I've kind of done some trial and error with this and you'll need to do the same I've got it set up to do nine shots which should cover the entire flower front to back and focus I got if the focus width set at 10 which that's a wide jump between each image but with this lens that works good I think with different lenses you might need much much difference so I'll just experiment and see what actually works I've set it for one second in between each shot first frame exposure lock is on I'm shooting completely manual so that doesn't matter and I have silent photography turned off because I'm using the fluorescent light if I was using like ambient light I'd probably turn silent photography only just to keep some clicks off my shutter or off of my yeah off my shutter but with a fluorescent light you want to not use silent photography because you might see some banding in your images so once you get everything set go up to start where I am now and click OK and it has made our images so take a look at these in the computer and see how they look now okay here are the nine photos we just made in Lightroom and I did take these when they're imported in Lightroom there's some noise reduction applied and there's some sharpening applied I took all of that out so these are all flat and I looked at them pretty good before I started talking to you and really just number two three four and five have in focus data or remember we started a little bit back focused and I let it do nine shots and we can take a look at him pretty big here the first one doesn't really have anything that's fully in focus the second one there's some information here and here that starting to be in focus but still places like back here or not that may be difficult to see on YouTube so you'll just have to take my word for it if you're not on a pretty decent monitor and a pretty decent bandwidth connection second picture even sharper and focus here in this area back here which is kind of the farthest away part of the image is starting to get sharper and there's the next one sharper still and this is starting to go out of focus now so now you can see the benefit of focus to focus stacking there's no one image that has the whole flower in focus here's the next one that's pretty sharp right there and this is way out of focus now so let's see where we're at and that is the last one that I'm going to use the next one pretty much I don't know there's some let's see no that starts to that area which in picture number five is sharp right over here picture number six it starts to fall off so we're just going to use number two three four and five and I've given those five stars I've already decided that that's the way we're going to go so we're going to enable filters and actually we're going to filter by rating five stars and that'll just leave those pictures so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to highlight all four of them I did that by holding shift and tagging the fourth picture and that highlights them all and the rest of our work will happen in Photoshop so we're going to click on photo edit in don't click on edit in Photoshop click on edit as layers in Photoshop and that will open up Photoshop and bring all four of these pictures into Photoshop okay so now here we are in Photoshop and here's our four stacked images or images that we're going to stack that we sent over from Lightroom so we're going to do the same thing we're going to highlight all four of them I've got the first one highlighted I'm going to hold shift click on the fourth one and that will highlight them all the first thing we're going to do is to align them and to do that we come over here at the top and click on edit and go down to align layers we're going to do that automatic with vignette removal and compensate for barrel pin cushion or a fisheye Distortion I think we're going to leave that alone we're just going to do and yet removal and we're going to say okay and I don't have the fastest computer in the world and even though we're only doing four files here it still takes my computer a little bit of time so I'm going to pause the video and rejoin you when it's through process is complete we have our four layers aligned the next thing to do is to focus stack them and that would be photoshopped edit whoops Auto blend layers that's how we focus stack the images you can panorama or stack and stack is actually focused stack so we're going to focus tack we're going to click on seamless tones and colors and content-aware fill on transparent areas and go and once again my computer slow so I will skip forward to when this is done and rejoin the video there instead of having you wait through all this mess it has taken hour for images and photo or focus stack them you can see these layer masks you can see the first picture the wide areas in the layer mask over here on the side is what it let come through and the black areas is what it blocked the second picture it let most of the flower come through the third a little bit more and by the fourth picture just the back ring the furthest part away is what it let come through so there it is focus stacked and you know even though we were at f11 it still took four images to get the whole flower in focus so that is what you do when you are focused acting the next thing we can do is go to layer and flatten and that will turn all that data into just one file and then we can save and that will save it as a tiff file and it will go back into lightroom and then you can do your your develop settings on it and you know edit the image to taste but I'm just showing you how to use the focus stacking feature that's built into the d8 50 and the Z 7 and z 6 and then how to how to align and stack those images in Photoshop and Lightroom so after that you're on your own and do your own edit and however you like but that's how you do it and hey I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this video if you liked it it'd be great if you took a moment and clicked subscribe and also click the thumbs up like button that helps me out as well and I really would appreciate it and I hope you can have a great day and I look forward to seeing you in the next one bye bye [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Phil Thach

Views: 34,769

Rating: 4.9211617 out of 5

Keywords: Nikon, Z6, Z7, D850, Focus Shift, Focus Stacking, macro, rose, flower, photography, great feature, feature, focus shift feature, Z 6, Z 7, how-to focus stack, how-to use nikon focus shift

Id: IccUcIlMbvM

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019