Today’s experiment is focus stacking.
I took 12 images of this flower, with a 60mm macro lens about 15 inches away. With the lens set on manual focus, I moved the focus of the lens slightly between each photo. Then I stacked the photos in Photoshop, and used the auto-blend layer stack option.
The result is pretty good. What could make the result better:
- more patience on my part
- an automated way of changing the manual focus – there is equipment for this. I just tried to manually turn the lens a small amount between each photo
- a steady tripod – mine is the $20 tripod version, so is not rock-solid within and between shots
- probably a different scene or getting closer to benefit the full use of the macro lens would be a more interesting shot
- Photoshop’s autoblend action creates a different layer mask for each layer in the focus stack, so it would be possible to adjust any of these masks to refine the results. I kind of liked the way the automation created sharp focus in the gray background at the bottom, but not at the top, so I left that alone.