The EASY way to FOCUS STACK

Focus stacking is getting a lot more popular among landscape photographers these days. For those of you who are not familiar with it; it’s a process of taking multiply shots focusing on different areas of the image and then combining them in Photoshop. As a result you will get perfect focus and sharpness from the front to the back of your image. For example your object in the foreground is in focus (in my case the chain on the wall) and the island in the distance. If you were to try and get the entire image sharp and in focus throughout in one shot it wouldn’t be perfect. It might be presentable for some or in a lot of cases fine for social media, but for print not so much. It would be on the softer side the island in the distance. Before Photoshop got some great new updates to it’s software you had to do it manually in Photoshop and the process was more complicated and required more steps to create the focus stacked image. Now Photoshop can automatically decide which parts of your images are the sharpest and blend them together to make the focus stacked image itself. In this blog post I’m going to show you the EASY 3 STEP PROCESS.

Step 1.  Open Lightroom and highlight the images you wish to focus stack. Then Right-Click  > Select Edit In > Open as layers in Photoshop.

Step 2. In Photoshop Click Edit > Auto-Align Layers as its always good practice to align them first before we do the focus blend.

Step 3. Then Click Edit > Auto-Blend Layers and make sure “Stacked” is checked and click OK.

And that’s it!! You should be left with a perfectly sharp image throughout. 🙂