The FASTEST WAY to FOCUS STACK!

the kids said I need to work on my my introduction of these videos said I shouldn't just jump right into it but I think people want to rather a total most like I think people would rather just skip the pleasantries and just get right down to the reason why they clicked on the video focus stacking is a is a technique that I use more and more often in many of my images and I posted a photo on Instagram and Facebook last week I believe from a recent backpacking trip I was on and I got a couple comments of you know how I how I shot the image or did I focus stack it or not and this you know I got you got me thinking because this is an interesting image you probably want to think you need to focus stack this image because it's not a real grand Vista you know this entire scene for run in the background is probably like 30 40 yards at the most and a lot of times you think of a focus stack scene is just very deep you know maybe you know a mile 20 miles away but this image was the complete opposite of that and you know there's really two types of images that you you you wouldn't you know normally we focused of course you had the type of image that is that a very grand Vista and you could focused at that image if you really wanted to go the extra mile but if not you could probably get away with it not focus stacking you so either way is really fine but then you have other images like this one here that I shot where you absolutely have to focus stack it I'll jump into Lightroom here so you can take a closer look and the reason why is you know one there wasn't or the reason why I had to focus like this one is because there's not a lot of available light this was shot at sunrise you can see the Sun starting to peek through and there's moving water so I really couldn't stop down to you know f11 and f-16 and focus on the the stone in the foreground in order to get the background in focus 1 foreground was too close to my camera the background still wouldn't have been in focus into there was very very little ambient light available and it would have made my shutter speed 3 or 4 seconds which would ultimately lost all the detail in the water in a water would have just turned into like a soupy milky mess which I don't like that look at all I always try and keep you know some detail in the water not so much to where you freeze the water but you know I try and keep some detail in it but also still show that it's you know flowing water so what I ended up doing was shooting this image at five six five point six and one thirteenth of a second ISO 400 this was shot with -16 235 at 24 millimetres and I shot a total of three images for this focused AK series now the the very first one is you can see all three of them down here this one was focused on the immediate foreground as you can see it is perfectly focused and as I move through the image you'll notice that the the mid ground right here is out of focus and the background is completely out of focus as well now if I look at my my second image here this is the image that I actually focused on the the the boulders in the middle of the image of our you know covered in green moss so if i zoom in here give my second to computer go get my computer a second to catch up you'll see that this entire area is completely in focus the stone in the front is now out of focus and the background of course is out of focus as well now my final image here this is the image that I shot for the background and you guessed it if the foreground of the mid-ground are gonna be out of focus and the background is going to be perfectly sharp and as you can see right here everything in the background all the leaves and the trees are perfectly sharp and as we move through the image all the way down to the boulder in the media foreground it's completely out of focus so now that I have my entire focus stack series is shot and it doesn't have to be three images you could shoot as many as you want I usually usually shoot three sometimes I might actually shoot five but it's very rarely do I ever go beyond that and once you have all your images loaded you know I always like to go ahead and put an initial edit on here which you can you can see what I did for this particular image and then if you're not familiar with how to sink in an edit of one image across a series of images I'll show you how to do that right now it's real simple we have the image right here that I put the Edit on just hit shift and highlight all three are all the images in your focus stack series or your series to focus stack right click on the image that you have the Edit on and go to develop settings and go to sync settings I'm going to leave everything checked these are all the individual items that you're telling a light room that you want to synchronize and just have synchronize and every single one of these images now will have the exact same treatment applied so now what we need to do is highlight all three of the images oops I could like a computer could catch up one two three all three images we're going to right click and we're going to go up to the top and we're going to go to edit in open as layers in Photoshop now depending on the speedier computer this could take anywhere from 30 seconds it could take you a few minutes really depending on like I said it's speedier computer but also if you have you know like 9 or 15 images in your focus tag series this could definitely take a few minutes to do but ultimately what it's going to do is exactly what the what you told Photoshop to do is going to put a each individual photo in your series into its very own layer so you can work with it that way and so the Photoshop right now is reading the individual photos right now so it looks like it's already created one right here and this is honestly probably the part of the process that takes the longest and it looks like it's almost done and we're ready now so all three of the images are loaded in here so what we want to do is we're going to highlight all three of them I'm going to come up here to edit Auto align layers and you can leave this set at Auto and just hit OK what this is gonna do is in case you know one of your images maybe your ball head started to slip a little bit or you bumped your tripod or the gust of wind came by it's just going to align all three of the images and if there's any and a movement at all you'll be able to see it because I'll be a little bit of a white area around the edges and as you can see it looks like there was a little bit of movement so what we're gonna do is we're just gonna go up here to crop we're going to just bring this side and just a touch do the same thing at the bottom like that and just hit okay and now all three of the images are perfectly aligned once you have that done we're going to leave all three layers highlighted here we're gonna go back to edit we're gonna go to auto blend layers you can leave this on stack images and hit OK you know what Photoshop is going to do is going to blend in all the areas that are in focus versus all the areas that are out of focus for all three of the images and it's going to complete a map there come it's gonna create a master copy of all three of the images together only using the perfectly sharp areas to create a final image that's perfectly sharp from the stone in the foreground all the way through the trees in the background which is what you can see right now so what we'll do is we'll zoom in here to a hundred percent so you can take a look and as you can see the stone here is perfectly in focus the mid-ground here perfectly sharp and you guess that the trees in the background perfectly sharp as well and that's it what's also cool is you can actually see the individual masks that were created here so if I untitled or turn off the the final image here you can actually see the image how the image was created so this is the the background area is used almost all of that area that was in focus and then you can just add it all and you know piece it all together by turning the layers on and off just kind of like a puzzle so I don't know I always thought that was kind of cool and then your final image here is at the very top so as you can see it's it's a very very simple process to do you know probably the longest process of this entire you know focus stacking technique is really just loading the the layers into Photoshop it takes you know like I said sometimes it up for a minute but actually stacking the images together very very simple to do and it very very easy techniques if you have any questions as always just leave me a comment below and I guarantee I get back to you I hope the video was informative and you're able to to get something out of it it's actually a really fun technique once you get comfortable to get comfortable using it and get comfortable with how you actually shoot the series of images it's a it's pretty simple to do and a lot of fun so as always I appreciate you watching and I will see you all next week

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 286,794

Keywords: focus stacking, how to focus stack, best way to focus stack, how to focus stack in photoshop, how to focus stack fast, focus stacking landscape photography, best focus stacking for landscape, how to focus stack images, fastest way to focus stack, focus stacking photos, focus stacking tutorial, focus stacking camera technique, focus stack, image focus stacking, focus stacking photoshop, focus stacking youtube, landscape photography tips, landscape photography, mark denney

Id: a9dEuTxJ2_Q

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 05 2018