Ok, all shots taken and I mentioned that this was HDR so I had nine separate exposures to play with in photoshop. This captured the sea, horizon and sky nicely. Short of infinityįor the last shot, I focused just short of infinity. As you can see the immediate foreground and sky are a blur. The aim was to include the rest of the foreground rock. The next shot has the focus on the rocks at the back.

The part of the rock which is line with the edge of the puddle has the best focus – everything else is a blur. As you can see, the very bottom of the rock is still not in focus. Therefore, a smaller aperture was required to include a bit more of the immediate foreground focus. I had to choose f/14 for this sequence because the immediate foreground was closer than the nearest point of focus. Lens have their best quality in the middle somewhere around f/8. The choice should be around the middle aperture of your lens to get the sharpest image possible. You don’t normally need to close down to f/16 or f/22 because the technique allows you to layer the different focal plains. Choosing your aperture carefully is important. This was also an HDR image, so we can look at a few of the original frames for analysis. Without Focus stacking, I would have attempted to get the whole of the foreground in focus and left the sky and horizon out of focus. In this scene the immediate foreground is just a few inches from the front of the lens.Įven at f/22, I would not have been able to capture full sharpness in every part of the scene. For my first attempt, I chose a landscape scene with a huge focal challenge. Usually an f/16 and careful hyper-focal calculations will achieve this. Landscape could benefit as there is a requirement for sharpness throughout the scene. This technique is popular for macro work, where the DOF is usually too shallow to capture all the sharp detail in a subject. The main challenge is, maybe, deciding what situations exactly would require this sort of treatment. the aim is to achieve a high depth of field (DOF) whilst maintaining the high quality of your lens’ sweet-spot. This articles looks at a lengthy and complicated procedure to render every part of a scene with perfect focus.

Photo stacking in photoshop