Focus Stacking Macro Photographs — Photoshop Tutorial

In my previous post, I explained about ‘4 things you should do before focus stacking a macro photograph’. I would like you to read it for a better understanding of this tutorial and getting good results. This post is a step by step photoshop tutorial on focus stacking  macro photographs. I would recommend you to use Adobe Photoshop CS4 (or higher version), Helicon plus.

Read:

• 4 things you should do before focus stacking

I use both Adobe Photoshop CS4 and Helicon plus for focus stacking. But it’s very simple to stack the images in cs4. I will explain with an example.

In the above example, two subjects are encountered in both foreground and background. So, focus stacking is required to apply since I  could not bring both the subject into focus. So, three images were taken at different focus points (Analyze the source images to find out the area of focus in each one of them)

EXIF data of the input images:
Shutter Speed: 1/400
Aperture: F/12
ISO: 200
These settings were applied on all the three images but in different focus area (I have explained more about this in my previous post). Below are the steps for focus stacking photos in Photoshop (please click on the images to enlarge)

Photoshop tutorial on focus stacking 

Step 1: Save the images to be focus stacked in a separate folder to avoid confusion in choosing the images. Now choose File->Scripts ->Load files into stack and Load layers dialog box will be appeared.

Step 2: In load layer window, click browse button and choose the images to be stacked from the corresponding folder.

Step 3: Select all the layers and choose Edit->Auto Align Layers.  Now, Alignment will be done automatically based on the number of layers.

Step 4: Now, Choose Edit->Auto –Blend layers and then dialog box will be appeared.  Select Stack Images option from the dialog box and click OK button. After few seconds, final image will be produced

Step 5: After stacking the images, final image might be unaligned. So, cropping is required to improve the frame. So Enter ‘C’ for cropping tool or choose Image > Crop from the photoshop .  Crop the image according to the alignment.

Step 6: Now, the three source images are processed and merged by photoshop. Right click on the top layer (see the image on step 5) and click Flatten Image. Then save the focus stacked image. Final image can be used for further stacking to get better details of the subject.

I hope you will find this tutorial useful. I would suggest you to follow this for focus stacking the macro photographs. If you have any questions, please drop them as comments.

More from Srivatsan Sankaran

• 10 tips to shoot macro droplets on flowers
• 2 things you should do before post processing macro photographs
• Photoshop tutorial on post processing a macro photograph

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