Focus Stacking

And now (as John Cleese once used to say) "... for something completely different".

As I look around the site I see that lots of people are doing the wonderful TT challenge. WWombat is to be heartily congratulated for kicking the whole thing off and so many of the rest of you are to be congratulated for keeping it all alive. Macro photography seems very popular on Blip. While I have not participated myself I have often played the part of "lurker" in that I try to keep up most weeks with what many people are doing.

I am not by temperament a macro photographer myself but for many years I shot small "products" for catalogues and journals. An important part of that sort of thing is the need to show subjects with as much detail and clarity as possible. Unfortunately the smaller the subject and the closer one focuses, the less functional depth of field one can muster. The classic way around the dof problem is to "focus stack". I used to use an extended full version of Photoshop which had the routines to get the job done. Before that I had a specialist stand alone piece of software which I don't think is available anymore. I can't even remember what it was called (dementia you know). I do remember that both were a pain in the neck to use.

Having gotten out of the practice of doing this sort of thing and having quite forgotten just about all I ever knew about how to do it, I recently set about re-learning the technique. This turned out to be more a case of learning from scratch in reality but so far (cross fingers) it's all been pretty straight forward. Cutting to "the chase" - I have found a way to stack focus which is dead simple, dirt cheap, very fast and ultra reliable. Want to know what I found out? Stay tuned for tomorrow and I'll tell you all about it.  I'll post a few links, set out some simple instructions and invite you all to give it a go.