Depending on the lens and the focus distance, you may need anything from four shots up to a dozen. Ideally, you’ll want several images that center on the foreground, midground, and background. Then capture additional photos while moving the focal point back gradually. Once you set up your scene and your camera is ready, start by focusing on the foreground and taking a few shots. This is not a good time for your camera to make decisions for you. You’ll also want to change your camera’s settings to manual, including manual focus and white balance. Use a timer or a remote shutter release to minimize camera shake. Image via Shutterstock How to stack focusįocus stacking is best done on a tripod because you’ll have to blend the images later in Photoshop. That’s exactly where focus stacking comes in handy. This often happens in landscape photography when you want a prominent foreground element to stay sharp while also keeping a background element in focus.

The problem is that even with small apertures you can’t always pull ideal sharpness from the foreground through to the background. But if the whole image needs to be in focus, you choose a smaller aperture, for example f/16 or f/22. If you want a small depth of field and a blurry background or foreground, you choose a large aperture such as f/2.0. That’s the object in the scene the camera will focus on. Also known as z-stacking, focus stacking maximizes depth of field (DOF).Īny time you take a photograph, you choose a focus point. During the editing process, you then layer the parts together to create a single, final image that’s crisp and clean. What is focus stacking?įocus stacking is the technique of taking several photographs of the same scene or object while focusing on different parts of the image. The best part is, post-editing in Adobe Photoshop makes this seemingly complex trick a breeze. If you need tack-sharp images throughout your depth of field, focus stacking is your tool of choice.

Lenses aren’t uniformly sharp at every aperture, so even if you have a great lens, a fair amount of blur can impact your work. Sharp focus is a prerequisite of quality photography, but it’s not always easy to get the focus you want.

Photo stacking in photoshop