How To Create Stunning Depth of Field with Focus Stacking in Macro Photography

What is Focus Stacking?

Focus stacking is a technique used in photography to increase the depth of field in an image. It involves taking multiple photographs of a scene, each with a different focus point, and then combining them into a single image using specialized software.

In focus stacking, the photographer takes several photos of the same scene, moving the focus point slightly between each shot. For example, in macro photography, where the depth of field is very shallow, a photographer may take multiple shots of a flower, focusing on different parts of the flower in each shot.

The individual images are then loaded into software designed for focus stacking. The software analyzes each image and blends the areas of the image that are in focus, resulting in a final image where everything appears to be in sharp focus.

Focus stacking is commonly used in macro photography, landscape photography, and product photography, where a deep depth of field is required to capture fine details.

Photoshop for Photographers

“Photoshop for Photographers” was designed as a supplemental resource for my class, “Photoshop for Photographers.” The goal is to teach you how to use Adobe Photoshop step by step. I understand this path is not for everyone and there is no reason you have to follow this process. However, if you want to really learn the program, I would suggest learning everything on the video and then move on.

“Focus Stacking can create a larger ‘Depth of Field’ than you can capture in one image.”

JOHN WHITEHEAD IMAGES

Photoshop Requirements and Hard Drives

Working in Adobe Photoshop and with photography is more than just installing software and saving images to your computer. Computers these days are using solid State Drives SSD, which are fast, but do not have a large storage capacity. If you start downloading a bunch of photographs to your computer, it will not take long until you get a “Scratch Disk Full” error. This means your internal hard drive is full. Just to run a computer and Adobe Photoshop you need a sufficient amount of free space. Image previews are usually stored in a computer’s cache. This a temporary storage so it can quickly retrieve previews without recreating them every time you look at them. I cover this in the my Photoshop Preferences Tutorial. Personally, I store all caches on an external hard drive. At this moment I have 4 different hard drives hooked up to my computer. Two SSD’s and two enterprise optical drives, each performing a different task. All these drives are backed up via BackBlaze.

Another important aspect of running any of Adobe’s products are them requirements. Adobe lists the minimum requirements to run each of their programs, but you never want to be using the minimums, or the speed will drive you nuts. You need to realize that that your computer and every other application you run have requirements. So if you have Photoshop’s min of RAM 4GB, that will not allow any for your computer to run or a browser like Chrome. Below I will have two lists. One is some reasonable minimum requirements to run Adobe Software and what I am running. The second is a list of issues you will run into with insufficient hard drive space, and low minimum requirements. Just about every online student that I teach run into these issues. I hope this helps.

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I have a Facebook Group called, “Learn Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, and Bridge.” I created this group because I get a lot of questions on YouTube that are hard to answer unless I can see the issue. This will allow a place you can ask questions, and more importantly post images and videos.