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How & Why to Use Focus Stacking (focus bracketing) Technique:
We often use focus stacking for critical product shots, where closed aperture or tilt-shift lens does not provide enough DOF and/or details. For this photography and photoshop CS5 tutorial, we have photographed a silver bracelet, positioned at about 45 degree from a camera focusing plane.
First let me go over the lighting set up used for this Jewelery shot . Even though focus stacking technique can be used for any type of photography where sharp focus throughout the image is required:
Set up for Jewelry Photography:
Subject was placed on white seamless surface. When looking at this particular product (silver bracelet) please notice that it is not entirely bright shiny silver but also has black cast as a part of the design, I wanted to make sure it will be correctly shown on the final image. So, the idea here is to have soft, even lighting (Tiffany-like, take a look at their silver pieces), yet to show the rough texture of the bracelet surface. To achieve desired look first thing I needed is to hide the bracelet from direct light. I’ve used 2 foam boards: Board 1 is white foam board, positioned the left side of the jewelry piece. Board 2 is a 50% gray and is positioned to the right of the jewelry piece.
Lighting:
First light (front left), is a WL X1600 strobe unit with 20 degree honeycomb grid is creating a spot on the right (gray) foam board and simultaneously spilling light onto the table right in front of the bracelet. The hot spot in the board is being reflected in the curves of the bracelet creating a bright life-full highlights , while the softer part of the light that is being projected onto gray card is being reflected in mid-tones of this jewelry piece. The White card (left of the subject) is being reflected in left part of the bracelet. Such lighting scenario produces even and smooth look.
Second Light Strip box (back, center) is projecting light onto the background. Not only it is lighting the background but also spilling onto the surface and bouncing off both (white and gray) boards adding over all softness. Please note that none of the light sources are hitting bracelet directly.
Focus stacking technique:
The idea is similar to a HDR photography, but instead of exposure bracketing, we do a focus shift- a.k.a. Focus Bracketing: To achieve focus bracketing: For each shot we move camera slightly to cover another piece of the object, and then merging all this captures in one during the post-production: using adobe photoshop CS5.
The correct way to change a focusing point is to change the distance between the camera and our subject by moving the camera while lens zoom and focusing point should not be changed. The best way to achieve precise movement is to use macro focusing rails (I use Manfrotto 454 Micrometric Positioning Sliding Plate)
For camera settings we use completely manual mode: manual exposure and manual focus.
For this image I used F11 aperture: this is right in the middle of “sweet spot” for the lens I’ve used, Canon 180mm F3.5L macro.
Why F11 Aperture was used:
As we all know, DOF gets increased (more deep) when we close aperture (larger number on F stop value). However, every lens looses contrast and amount of visible details (linear resolution) when aperture gets closed or gets wide open: diffraction starts playing a big role when light travels trough a pin hole lens… Each lens has it’s own “usable” range (you have to “master” your lens to find it), but even most expensive ones does not do a good job at it’s maximum F-stop number. You can see examples of how image gets changed when we go from F8 to F16, than F22 and f32 on my another article, where I’ve compared Hasselbald H4D-50 and Canon 1Ds MkIII.
Focus Bracketing:
I did total of 12 shots for the bracelet: by doing a little bit more then needed, overlapping focused area on each shot, we got that extra amount details on the final, merged image. Photoshop does great job of pulling all the usable information from each shot and combining it on one final super-image:-) see video above for Focus Stacking using Adobe Photoshop SC5.
Those extra shots did not cost me much time, but the end result… that amount of details you can’t get even with 50+ megapixel medium format camera when the image is done in one shoot.
See yourself:
Full image:
100% crop of the left end of the bracelet:
100% crop of the right end:
100% crop of the center:
The video will take you step by step through the process. Enjoy 
Hardware/software used for the shoot:
* Canon 1Ds mark III DSLR
* Canon 180mm F3.5L macro lens
* Manfrotto macro focusing rails
* Manfrotto 405 geared head
* Fatif studio stand
* Manfrotto (bogen) shooting table (roll of seamless paper can also be used)
* White Lighting monolight units
* Photoshop CS5 Extended
Give this tutorial a try and post your results here using “Share Your Shot” feature in comments box. Do you use Focus Stacking in your photography? What do you shoot using this technique?
Related Tutorials:
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