Photoshop stacked focus

Stacked focus. Double clicky for bigger BIGGER, if you dare.

Here's the deal-io, Kids.

After all that, waiting, stacking, aligning, choosing, and masking, and finally compressing, Photoshop's stacked focus still has out-of-focus bands running across the full length of the image.



Can ya see 'em? Can ya see 'em? Huh? Huh? Huh? Can ya see 'em?

The out-of-focus bands continue clear across the whole image through the meat and through the bands on the plate.





Those are the horizontal bands, but there are vertical bands too.



Can ya see 'em? Can ya see 'em? Huh? Huh? Huh? Can ya see 'em?

There are also little naked splotches all over the place.



And then lastly, but mostly, there is this dreadful bit with the plate rim at the bottom.



All these things can be fixed. Chiefly by taking better more stable shots to begin with, but short of that they're still fixable within Photoshop, especially with the help of its new 'content aware' tool, that sometimes takes a few tries to get right. But all that is not so easy or fast no matter what methods are used. It is still quite tedious to go over the image section by section making corrections:  cloning, masking, selecting, feathering, copy/pasting new layers and so on, as hard or easy as picking one image for a base, then picking and choosing patches using ordinary layers. Or better yet, using a tripod to shoot. Or  even better than better,  use a lens with depth of field or live with and love bokeh. After all, it just an exercise anyway, most any of the original images are fine were they not shot purposefully with stacked focus in mind.

So there's that.

I wondered how things would work if the dimensions of the files were reduced before they were loaded into a stack, and then go through the stack and do much of what Photoshop is expected to do, stretch its outer edges, hither and tither, jerking the layers one by one on top of each other as closely as possible before having Photoshop do the aligning. Then finally have Photoshop do the blending automatically as usual. I was afraid that sacrificing that much data would badly affect the result, but I was interested in seeing if that would take much of a load off my poor little grinding moaning protesting laptop. The final image would be 700px wide. There will be trim on the stacked focus image no matter what. So, wad'dya say the images are reduced to 1,000px width giving a nice fat margin to play with and still over halving the total original width. (quartering the width from the same images still available in RAW ) Here is the result.


The exact same problems as the larger set. Now why does that surprise me?

All of this stacking, aligning, blending comes before any other adjustments in levels, curves, color balance, exposure, shadows/highlights etc.

I wonder what would happen if the number of images was reduced to a bare minimum.


Oops. Too minimal.

I wonder what would happen if I combined this with the original stacked
focus.




Hahaha.  Me likey. But it didn't fix the bottom egg. <--- nit picker.

Photoshop stacked focus

2 stacked focus images.

These shots were taken without a tripod. Through the viewfinder. I find that it is easier to compose the shot, check the corners, then when the viewfinder focus returns to the previous spot, mine seems to have a mind of its own and goes where it decides it will, go ahead and focus, tilting the focus box to the desired spot, then tilting the camera back to the pre-established composition, mindful of the corners, while maintaining my own bodily position. That is the best way to fire off a rapid sequence of shots without messing with a tripod and delicate refocusing through the live view.

Today I learned the battery for on the remote is dead.

combined image

I notice I did not get a shot with the mushrooms behind the biscuit in focus ↑ . My bad. 

combined image ↓

This isn't a very clean set. My eggs were cooking while I fired these off. 

stacked focus

Photographer Rob Cantor taught me how to do stacked focus today. Here is the dealio: it is for times when you would like to keep the depth of field but eliminate the bokeh so that the entire thing is focused without being flat, as other methods are prone to do along with other problems.  The idea is to focus at various depths  of the composition and have a program consolidate the areas that are in focus.

This is a photo stream focusing first at the back rim of the plate and then progressively through the crackers toward the front, then at the front rim of the plate. You will be able to see what is going on. Finally, the combined photo. The combined photo was further adjusted for exposure and levels.