The Easy Way to Sharp Images from Front to Back

This easy technique of focus stacking will ensure your pictures are pin-sharp

Get front-to-back sharpness in your photos, whether shooting products or landscapes. This easy technique will ensure your pictures are pin-sharp.

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop and this is Coffee Break Photography. Well, yesterday I helped a glass artist capture professional quality photographs of their artwork. One of the issues they faced was that the larger pieces were often sharp in the front but out of focus towards the back. When they shared this with me, I knew instantly what the problem was and how to solve it. So today, I'll share this same technique and it's called Focus Stacking. Well, before I demonstrate the technique, let's examine why the problem is occurring.

I'm going to use these three candle holders as an example. If you've seen my video, The Great Photography Aperture Lie, you'll know that a smaller aperture increases the depth of field, so I'll shoot this photo at f/16. The issue we have is that the three candle holders are 56cm from front to back, so regardless of where we focus, the full length of the subject won't be covered by the depth of field. So let's explore the technique we'll use to achieve a sharp image from front to back.

Hello and welcome to my lounge. So this is where we're going to do the focus stacking example today. You can see the settings we've got. We've got the three candle balls on the table, camera in front of the candle balls. The camera is linked to my laptop, so you're going to be able to see everything I do as I'm taking photographs through the screen. the rear screen. There is an automated way of setting your camera up to do this but not everybody is going to have these automated settings available inside of their camera.

So what I'm going to do is to show you the manual way of shooting focus stacking and then if you're interested in automating this so you just have one button press you can have a read of your manual it's usually fairly obvious how are you going to set the camera up and let it run away. So this is the manual process for doing it. So what I'm going to do I'm going to focus first of all on the front of the front candle ball. So set my focus point and then I'm going to press the shot button and that's the first picture taken and you can see this first picture the front ball is nicely in focus and the back ball is outside the depth of field as we get the kind of the blurry effect that you might see if you're shooting say a portrait.

So I'm now going to move the focus point from the front of the front candle ball to the back of the front candle ball. So that's probably about... three or four centimeters further back, focus and I'm going to retake that picture. I'm now going to move back to the front of the second candle ball for the focus point. So that moves us back, focus, take the shot. You can already see just where I take the shot that the front candle ball now is outside of the depth of field and the back two are more sharp. Probably if you look really closely you'll see that the back candle ball is also slightly outside of the focus point. So I'm going to take that shot. I'm going to take another shot just by moving the focus point to the back of the second candle ball, focus there, take the shot and then one final image is going to be taken with the focus point on the very rear of the candle ball.

Focus, take the shot and we now have five images with the focus taken at different points of the depth of field. So what we are now going to do is to take the five photos and put them into Lightroom and Photoshop and we’re going to show you how to use focus blending to get one image from front to back.

OK, now that we’ve shot the series of images, we need to go into Photoshop to complete the process. If you are a Lightroom user, the best way to transfer the pictures from Lightroom to Photoshop is to select all the photographs and right-click. Choose the option, Open as Layers in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, you can see all the images in the layers panel.

 The first thing we need to do is select all the layers. Go to the Edit menu and use the option Auto-Align Layers. Leave the Projection option set to Auto and press the OK button.  This ensures that all the layers are aligned correctly. Return to the Edit menu, and this time select the Auto-Blend Layers option. Ensure that the Blend Method is set to Stack Images and then click the OK button. After a few seconds, Photoshop examines all the images, chooses the sharpest elements of each one, and produces a new layer. As you can see, this layer has the front candle bowl in focus, while the background is also sharp. Before we take the shot back into Lightroom, go to the Layer menu and select the Flatten Image option. This reduces the file size and helps keep your hard drive tidy.

 So there we have it: a simple way to ensure front-to-back sharpness. Obviously, you can use the same technique for landscape photography, although the distance between the focus points may be wider than in this example. In the coming weeks, I’ll share another technique that can achieve front-to-back sharpness in landscape photos, but this time using only one image. The best way to catch my new content is to hit the subscribe button down here.

 If you’ve enjoyed this video, it would be great if you could like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs-up button below the video. That way, a few more people will get to see it. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography, as well as exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Rich Dyson, from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.