recently was limited to those photographers with enough technical
expertise in Photoshop (or other software) to painstaking stack
layers of photos and then gradually erase parts of different layers to
reveal those areas of greatest sharpness, etc. Each photo becomes
a real labor of love and is very time intensive.
Now that programs like Zerene Stacker (also Photoshop CS4
and other software) can do this more automatically, focus
stacking is increasingly coming into its own. Today (using
Photoshop as an example) all that is necessary is to place the
stack of photos (at different focus points) as individual layers and
apply two commands to that stack, Align and Blend.
The “Align” command automatically works through the layers and
aligns the subject in each layer so they line up. Once that is done,
the “Blend” layer blends the aligned layers into a single photo,
automatically doing what previous photographers laboriously did by
hand. The resulting image is a stacked photo, where the stack of
individual photos has been aligned, blended, and reduced to a
single photo that appears to have great depth of field if all has
been done correctly.
Users of Adobe Lightroom 2.0 (and higher) can select a series of
photos in Lightroom and send them to Photoshop where they can
be aligned, blended, and automatically saved back into Lightroom,
including any adjustments made to the photos in Lightroom. What
this means is that focus stacking is now available to a much wider
group of users than in the past. Just as HDR- stitched photos have
become very popular and have their own special “look,” we can
expect to see focus stacking following on the same path to more
common usage. Focus stacking too has a certain look that
differentiates it from standard photos.
Perhaps camera makers like Nikon may include focus stacking
(focus bracketing) in future camera bodies just like they did with
aperture bracketing, which is now available. The user would
focus at the front and the rear of a subject, indicate how many
photos should be stacked (or an increment) and the camera
would do the rest. Of course, this sounds like a job that would
require a tripod. For shots of live subjects, in-camera focus
stacking would further open up this technique since the stacked
series would happen at maximum speed. A dampener on this
idea is the fact that many of the best macro lenses do not even