Why I NEVER Focus Stack my Photos...

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to today's video which is either going to be about focus stacking and why i don't do it or it's going to be about hay fever just 10 minutes of me sneezing and probably crying because of my allergies should we roll the dice also today's video is sponsored by luminar you didn't expect me to say that did you yes luminar the amazing software that some of you have been telling me to use for years i've started using it in the last few weeks and i'm gonna have the opportunity to give some of you a free copy of luminar which is very exciting so stay tuned for that first off though i want to talk about focus stacking and why it is that i don't typically focus that which i've mentioned a few times in videos i don't think i've ever explained why hence some of you have asked me about it now focus stacking if you don't know is a method used when you've got a really deep scene to keep everything in focus so traditionally if for example my face was right up close to this lens and i wanted that in focus but i also wanted what was in the background in focus so in this instance this light but let's say we're outside and there's a mountain range and so you wanted the mountains in focus as well well traditionally hang on you know when a sneeze is right there well traditionally what you would do is use a really tiny aperture like f22 if your lens allows it and you would hope that that was a narrow enough aperture to get everything in focus there are a couple of problems with doing that though if you use a really narrow aperture for example you're probably going to end up with a really slow shutter speed so your subject might be moving or your camera might be moving even if you're on a tripod if you're out on a windy day also lenses very rarely perform all that well at apertures like f22 and often you end up with diffraction and just a result that's nowhere near as sharp as if you had used a moderate aperture so focus stacking aims to solve this simply by stacking a few different images together that are focused in different places so yeah that's what focus stacking is now i used to use focus stacking all the time particularly when i was a composite photographer because if for example i wanted to put a shower cap on the gurken building in london then i needed to make sure that both the building and the shower cap were completely in focus from front to back because if i didn't let's say for example the shower cap wasn't in focus at the back but the building was in focus all the way through well it wouldn't look very realistic so what i'd do is make sure that everything was in focus and then i could use software to introduce things like field blur if i did want some areas of the image to be blurred uh so yeah that's probably what i've used focus stacking most in the past i've also used it for product photography so for example if i wanted to take some photos of my watch then chances are i'd use focus stacking to make sure that i had the whole face in focus if that's what i wanted to do because i'd want to use moderate apertures to get the sharpest results but when you use moderate apertures not much of the image is in focus so you need to stack images together to get more in focus at maximum sharpness now focus stacking is also used by landscape photographers outdoor photographers in um in some instances and i never really do that and it's for a couple of reasons first off i very rarely take images that have got deep enough scenes to warrant the need for focus stacking for example the thumbnail image for this video is a terrible example of an image that would ever need to be focused stacked it's not particularly deep the closest thing is like i don't know 30 yards away which does not warrant a deep scene if the closest thing was 30 inches away and i wanted to focus all the way to infinity that would be a pretty deep scene but the image that i used in this thumbnail you'd never need to focus stack that and to be honest that's fairly typical of most of my photography i very rarely have something really close to the camera and something really far away and as a result i don't need to focus stack all that much now when i do have a scene like that where i've got something really close to the camera and also things really far away i never want to have both of those things in focus now some of you might have been hoping that i was going to cause some controversy by saying that i don't want to do that because it's the wrong thing to do it's not a technically correct way of working or something along those lines absolutely not it's completely personal preference i've seen some great images that focus front to back that i really like it's just not what i like to do for my personal photography and the reason for that is that well all of the lessons i've ever learned about photography i think could be distilled into one particular theme and that theme is simplicity and i think you could make a perfectly reasonable argument to suggest that having an image that's focused front to back makes things simpler but my personal take on simplicity is that you can make an image much more simple by that not being the case so i read a book a few years ago called thinking fast and slow and what i took from that book is that the brain in many cases is quite sort of lazy not lazy but it likes to take shortcuts it likes to jump to conclusions when it thinks it can skip out some of the work and that being the case when i'm trying to take a photo of something i try and make sure that the brain has to do as little work as possible to get to whatever i'm trying to show the viewer so ultimately the name of the game quickly becomes avoid distractions and there are loads of ways that you might avoid distractions in photography so you might crop your photos if you've got things that are distracting around the corners of the frame you might clone some of your images to get rid of some of the distractions that are more towards the middle of the frame perhaps you might use contrast so you might use really dark elements of an image to draw attention to the lighter parts of an image you could use color so you could study the color wheel work out what's the dominant color in a frame and then if you've got something that you want people to focus on you could then use the opposite color to draw attention to that particular thing and you can use bokeh which if you don't know is basically a word for out of focus blur now what i thought i'd do is quickly demonstrate the power of this based on one of my favorite films by the legendary director quentin tarantino so in this scene you can see an army general and a soldier i don't know the ranks and the the particular military terminology but there's two people in a room having a conversation basically but in this shot as you can see the soldier is still in the frame but out of focus and the camera isn't focused on him and therefore we are not focused on him now the fact that he's in the frame is important because it reminds you that those two people are having a conversation if he wasn't in the frame you might wonder where the person who wasn't talking was but by making sure he's blurred and not in focus you're not wondering why he's got so much neck hair and you're not thinking that he should change his shampoo because he's got a bit of dandruff you're not thinking about that because you can't see it you're just aware that he's there and that helps add to the story without causing unwanted distraction another example from the same film earlier in the same film what a film as you can see here the foreground grass is out of focus and therefore you're not focused on the foreground grasp you're focused on the girl running does exactly the same thing and like i say in my particular photography i don't use this technique all that much but when i do it's because i want the foreground interest because i think it adds to the photo normally it's grass and it's greenery and i think it adds to the feel of nature in an image but i don't want it in focus because i don't want to be a distraction from what i want the viewer to look at and by using a shallower depth of field you don't just take away focus from what you don't want the viewer to look at you add focus from what you want the viewer to look at because the sharper things look even sharper than they otherwise would if everything in the frame was in focus in my opinion so yeah in short that's that's basically why i i don't focus stack because i very rarely shoot scenes with that depth and when i do i don't really want everything in focus for my my personal photos one word of advice though if you've not done this before or you've not really used the technique of uh having a shallow depth of field to kind of have things in the frame but not have people focus on them is that you really need to make sure that whatever you don't want in focus is really out of focus there's nothing worse than something being just a little bit out of focus and having a viewer really distracted by trying to work out if it's in focus or not so if you're going to throw something out of focus make sure you do it right okay now as i was saying before luminar so yes lots of you've been telling me to use luminar for quite a while now i've had some time to use it in the past few weeks and i'll be honest my mind was blown now there are loads of things i could talk about here but the first thing i want to mention is structure which adds detail but it's content aware so it only adds detail where the software thinks the detail would work which is amazingly powerful i as a test put this image into luminar and started playing around with and structure just looked amazing and i thought that was pretty cool but then i went to the much publicized sky replacement tool and uh well so going back to my composite days i used to spend hours literally hours afternoons trying to replace skies and make them look realistic and well watch this if i go into the sky replacement tool and i can just select any sky at will that looks incredible and i honestly i can't believe how good that looks now sky replacements they're not for everyone i get that some people lots of people prefer photography to be all in the frame all in camera that's absolutely fine but like i say somebody who spent hours doing this particularly for commercial projects in the past that is so impressive so this gave me an idea i thought we could have some fun with the competition so i've teamed up with luminar to give away five free copies of the software and what you have to do is download a seven-day free trial if you haven't got luminar already then take some of your favorite images maybe and run them through luminar have a play around and upload the before and after images onto instagram using the hashtag luminar and i'll pick five winners to give away a luminar license too if you've already got luminar and you win then i'll send you a book if you've already got a book as well i mean congratulations you you're just winning i'll close the competition on wednesday the what's the date wednesday the 20th of may so you've got a week and a half basically if you're watching this video as soon as it's uploaded so yeah good luck and um looking forward to seeing what you come up with anyway thanks for watching and uh that was quite good actually i didn't didn't get too interrupted by hay fever see you next time and um oh please subscribe if you if you haven't already cheers [Music] you

Channel: James Popsys

Views: 130,727

Keywords: focus stacking, photography, learn photography, photography basics, photography tutorial, luminar 4, james popsys, vlog, lightroom, photoshop, photo editing, aperture

Id: t_VdgYDGAJs

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020