{"id":9540,"date":"2014-03-25T07:32:58","date_gmt":"2014-03-25T14:32:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/?p=9540"},"modified":"2014-05-15T09:22:05","modified_gmt":"2014-05-15T16:22:05","slug":"my-first-not-entirely-successful-focus-stack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/2014\/03\/my-first-not-entirely-successful-focus-stack\/","title":{"rendered":"My first (not entirely successful) focus stack"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I was hiking on Upper Table Rock. The ground was covered with wildflowers and snow-covered Mt. McLoughlin looked splendid in the distance. So I took this photo of the wildflowers.<\/p>\n

\"foreground<\/a>

foreground focus<\/p><\/div>\n

But I wanted a photo with Mount McLoughlin in focus so I took another one. <\/p>\n

\"distant<\/a>

distant focus<\/p><\/div>\n

When I got home I was a bit disappointed in each photo. <\/p>\n

My photography and Photoshop skills are completely self taught. I have never taken a class, had a tutor\/mentor, or even read a book on either subject. I’ve learned merely by trial and error with my camera and trying different things in Photoshop.<\/p>\n

So what I wanted to do was combine the above two photos. I did so by using Photomerge (under File\/Automate) in Photoshop and unchecking the “Blend Images Together” option. Hit F7 to see the layers if your layers box isn’t already open. Select both images, and use Auto-Blend Layers (under Edit) to stack the images. The result is below.<\/p>\n

\"photomerge<\/a>

Photomerged focus stack<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s not perfect, but now I have a new option at my fingertips in the future. Two things I need to do differently:
\n1) Take more than two photos. Notice how the finished result is out of focus in the middle. Had I taken three or four photos, each with a different focus point, the entire stacked photo could have been in focus.
\n2) Maintain the same, or nearly the same, composition (and camera settings–shutter speed, ISO, aperture). I recomposed the scene a bit after taking the first image which doesn’t make for the best stacking conditions later in post.<\/p>\n

A more recent focus stack of a similar scene can now be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend I was hiking on Upper Table Rock. The ground was covered with wildflowers and snow-covered Mt. McLoughlin looked splendid in the distance. So I took this photo of the wildflowers. But I wanted a photo with Mount McLoughlin in focus so I took another one. When I got home I was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,87,101,10],"tags":[22,285,116,70,231,197,181,284],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9540"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9889,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9540\/revisions\/9889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/ashland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}