Diffraction and Focus Stacking Tutorial
Here’s a little video that highlights how I overcome diffraction issues with today’s digital cameras and lenses by stacking multiple focal point images in Adobe Photoshop CS6 via Adobe Lightroom 4.
Jay Goodrich is an internationally published and celebrated professional photographer, writer, and workshop instructor. His work focuses on nature, architecture, and adventure subjects, and his clients have included fortune five hundred companies, trade publications, national and international magazines and books, graphic designers, architects, builders, commercial printers, and many others. For more information visit one of his websites at:
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December 14th, 2012 at 10:53 am
wow – I’ve been looking around for some technique very much like this! I have a Nikon 70-200 VR-I and it seems to me that f/8 or f/9 are its sweet spots. I hope this works on Ps5 – thank you
December 14th, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Thanks Emilio. It should work just fine in CS5.
December 15th, 2012 at 12:37 pm
This was very interesting and informative. I have heard of stacking but have not tried it. I currently shoot with a Canon 7D and haven’t been able to make the jump up to the 5D. I have been working on image sharpness for sometime now and this will be a very useful tool to incorporate in my workflow. Thank you very much for the tutorial!
December 15th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
Thank you Jay, great info! I am a LR4 and CS6 user also so I look forward to using this technique in the future….much more cost affective for me to do it in CS6 instead of the other software programs out there. I look forward to watching more of your tutorials in the future.
Thanks again!
December 16th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Thank you all for commenting. I really appreciate the positive responses.
December 20th, 2012 at 9:05 am
Nice tutorial Jay. I have one question though. Once you get to the stage where you finished the tutorial how do you like to handle your images from there? I noticed you didn’t flatten the layers. Do you do a “save as” and export into a .jpeg or .tiff file for printing? Then do you save the whole work as a .psd file so you can revisit it later if need be? Basically, how do you like to manage files that have gone through processes like this. Thanks.
December 20th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the comment. Once I have made sure all of the areas are merged properly, I do flatten the file and then proceed to make any additional adjustments as layers so they do not destroy the image. It is then saved a full-res tiff and imports itself back into Lightroom and stacks with the original files. Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Jay
December 20th, 2012 at 6:35 pm
That makes total sense Jay. I like to shoot close-ups and I’m looking forward to shooting some with the post-processing technique you described in mind. I’m thinking I might need to go 5-7 frames though.
December 21st, 2012 at 11:27 am
I don’t think there is any limit on how many you can add to the stacking so you should be just fine Bill.