this week I'll show you how to focus tack your landscape images to go from
this to this
sometimes you'll want everything in your photograph in focus from front to back
when you're using a really wide angle lens and you get your lens really close
to the foreground subject this can go beyond the capabilities of your camera
and this is when you need to focus stack when done right this looks really good
and everything in your foreground will have lots of detail as well as
everything right up to infinity this is one of the challenges with landscape
photography where you need to get everything from front to back in focus
due to diffraction you want to avoid your really small apertures I don't go
anywhere above f-16 so f-18 and f-22 I avoid now at f-16 when you're shooting
with a really wide angle lens and your foreground objects are really close to
the camera you won't get these in focus as well as the infinity point so this is
where you need to focus stack you basically take one shot where you focus
to the infinity point you'll focus two-thirds or half way into the shot and
then you'll focus on the foreground there are a few things you need to get
right when taking the shot to avoid any headaches later on in the process shoot
from a tripod get your composition and then lock down your tripod touch the
camera as little as possible to avoid any movement between the shots make sure
there's nothing that will bang into it knock it or move it in any way switch to
manual mode and dial in the settings you want this will ensure the exposure will
stay the same for all three shots then move your focus area to the furthest
visible place in your frame focus on that point and then take a shot I like
having my camera on a two-second delay so the camera will be perfectly still
when it takes the photograph then move your focus area to the midpoint focus on
that point and take another shot and then finally move the focus area to the
foreground focus once again and take your final shot if you inadvertently
knock your tripod or camera while you're taking these shots you'll have to start
the sequence again when I've got my shot and I'm satisfied that I focused in
those three points I'll maybe take another shot or get some other
compositions before heading home even though there are many
different editing programs I like to use Lightroom and Photoshop they work really
well together and you can transfer files from one to the other I'll always use
Lightroom for cataloguing and light editing and then I'll use Photoshop for
more advanced editing techniques when the Open Lightroom import the images
into Lightroom if you don't know how to do this click on the I in the corner
this will take you to my Lightroom workflow so I've imported the images
into Lightroom what I'm going to do is make sure they're all the right ones so
this first one is where I've focused on infinity so I focused on the mountain in
the background so you can see that is nice and crisp and clear I come to the
foreground it's a little bit fuzzy the next one along that sharpens up a little
bit and then the third one that's when I properly focused on this point so these
are the three images I'm going to work on what I'm gonna do is select all three
by holding shift and clicking on them then right-clicking on them and then
edit in open as layers in Photoshop once your computer has Photoshop opened
and it's brought the layers in you can see here there's three layers your
Photoshop might look a little bit different all I've done is this panel
here normally sits on the left hand side I've just brought this over to the right
hand side I feel this just makes it easier because I'll bring my mouse to
the right hand side to grab a tool go to the layers or anything I need to do all
of the tools are on the right hand side and then I'll edit the image here anyway
back to editing as you can see I've got my three layers here what I'm going to
do is rename them so I don't get confused as to which layer is what this
top layer is where I focus to infinity you can see it's a little bit soft in
the foreground and as we come through to the background the rocky outcrop is in
focus so this is infinity focus point and we'll just hide that one
and this next one think I've focused around about this point here so we'll
pull that the middle focus will hide that and this last one is where I
focused on the foreground you can see it's nice and sharp here so I've called
that one foreground focus point next thing I'm going to do is align layers
because if you see when I click on them and the focus breathing has actually
changed the framing just subtly so what I'm going to do select all layers click
on edit Auto align layers I keep it on auto and then click OK once Photoshop
has aligned the images what you want to do is try using the automated focus
stacking option what you need to do is select all of them again click on edit
water blend layers these two options at the bottom
I normally uncheck those seamless tones and colors seems to make some very
strange changes to the images sometimes especially if there's color differences
in the image and make sure stack images is selected and then I click ok so now
Photoshop has blended the images together you can see it's created masks
on each of them basically the way that a mask works is that it has a layer over
the top as we can see here everything in the mask that's white will be shown up
on that layer everything that's black in the layer mask won't be shown so if I
just hide the two bottom layers or press option or alt and click on the layer and
it shows the layer so you can see all the white bits there correspond to the
bits of the images that are shown and as you can see Photoshop has stitched the
images together what it thinks is in focus on one layer on the next layer and
then on the top layer now I've never really got good results with this so I
do it manually and I'll show you what I mean on this bottom layer this is where
just the foreground is focus however it's got these strips at
the side and the sky in the shop as well these art in focus if we look at the
image close-up and see where the problems lie
so I'll start in this bottom corner you can see that's nicely in focus as I come
up this edge you can see this bit is slowly going out of focus you've got a
really bad blend there as you go further up you can see it's really soft here as
well and this is why I like to blend it
manually so I'm going to undo this process to focus stack them manually
just make sure that the images are Auto aligned and then what we're going to do
is use masks I make sure that the one that has most of the image in focus is
on the top so my infinity focus point will have everything from this mountain
in the background and the clouds behind it right up to somewhere around this
midpoint in the image then the middle focus point has everything from that mid
point up to probably about here and then a foreground as the front of this rock
in focus so I'm going to start with this top one this is the one that has most of
the image in focus I'm going to click down here and create a layer mask you
can see it's created a completely white layer mask so I see all of this image I
just hide these two bottom ones I've got my layer mask selected here on my
palettes I've got black or white I'll just show you quickly what a layer mask
does just in case you don't know if I hold down option or alts and click on
the mask you can see it's completely white if I select my paint tool and I
paint a black line across the middle again hold option and click you can see
where that black line is on the mask is where it's deleted part of this image if
I was to have the image underneath you can see it blends together nicely if
however the paintbrush is grey or painting there you can see it's taken
around about 50% of the image away so layer masks are a really powerful tool
I'll just undo those two bits and start again so I have this top layer selected
I'm gonna select the middle focus point as well so what I'm gonna do is zoom in
on the image and I'm gonna start getting rid of where it goes out to focus so
I'll go to 100% you can see all of this background is in focus as I look through
the image I can see that the image starts to lose focus in this sort of
area so what I'm gonna do make sure my palette is black so I've got black and
white and this is another little point if you hit X see it switches between the
two so when you press X you can quickly switch between one palette and the other
I want to start rubbing things out so if I'm gonna have black selected in my
palette so now you can see as I paint over this bit it starts getting more in
focus
you can see as I painted in starts getting black on this bit here that's
what I painted so far don't worry about the changes with the auto-align we're
going to correct these later on so if we go to 100% you can see here it's not
very sharp got my black palette selected and as I paint over it and see it's
bringing up the sharpness so almost as if it's bringing the image into focus so
I think I've got all the points but what I'm gonna do is hold down option and
click on the mask you can see I've missed a few points so in pressing
option and clicking on the mask you can tidy it up so now click on option and
click on the mask again and that's covered all of that area next I want to
add the foreground bit because down here on the foreground it starts going out of
focus again it's only subtle but it does start dropping focus so again on this
middle focus point we're going to drop another mask it's a white mask so I can
see all of that image
I'll make sure the mask is selected I'll make sure black is selected on the
palette and again I'll start painting in this area I'll zoom into a hundred
percent so you can see it changing the focus so it's just sharpening it up even
more what you'll find is sometimes you'll start painting in a bit that'll
start to get fuzzy so this bit here is just dropping out of focus in this front
image what I'm gonna do is on this middle focus point mask I'm gonna switch
the palette back around and start painting white back into this image
that's the great thing with masks when you flip between white and black I can
delete part of an image and then I'll click to white and then I'll bring that
part of the image back so now the image looks really good it's focused from
front to back there's nothing that's out of focus
you can see the foreground is all in focus the sand and the rocks and as we
come back mid-ground is in focus as is the mountain in the background so that
looks good to me so there's a few things that I need to
do I want to get rid of the shadow from my tripod and also I need to crop in to
get rid of this edge here so the first thing I'm going to do is crop in so I'll
click on my crop tool the great thing with Photoshop is it finds edges so it's
just finding these close edges I'll double click on it and that'll crop in
the last thing I want to do is get rid of my tripod shadow so I'm going to use
the Spot Healing Brush tool ok and then I'll just tidy that up once you're happy
with your image save it and then go back to Lightroom once the new image is
loaded back into Lightroom you'll notice it that it's a tiff file as opposed to a
raw file so those are the Sony RAW files and this is the stat TIFF file you can
see that shadows gone and it's cropped in a little bit everything's in focus
from this foreground right through to the background
all you want to do now is edit the image as normal so if we look at the images
side by side the image on the left is a non stacked image the image on the right
is a stacked image if we zoom in on the foreground you can see it's quite soft
in the single image whereas in the stacked image it's perfectly in focus
and that's about it focus stacking is a great tool to have in your arsenal and
it's a fairly straightforward technique if you find yourself wanting to take a
shot where you're going beyond the focal distance of your camera this is the
technique to use just remember once you've found your composition get your
camera on your tripod focus in infinity the midpoint and the foreground so
you'll end up with three shots that you could edit later as always if you like
what you see give me a thumbs up if you didn't give me a thumbs down and for
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