Focus stacking can take your macro photography to a new level by allowing you to capture every detail of a subject in perfect clarity, even when that subject has considerable depth. It’s especially helpful for macro shots, where your focus plane is often razor-thin. But capturing a sharp, focus-stacked image doesn’t end with taking hundreds of shots in the field; processing them correctly is equally crucial.
Coming to you from Andrew Lanxon Photography, this informative video explains how to transform stacks of macro shots into a seamless, final image. Lanxon shows a stack he created while photographing mushrooms in the Scottish forest, a collection of over a hundred images. He uses a Canon EOS R5 with its focus-bracketing feature, which allows him to capture incremental shifts in focus points rapidly, making it much easier to gather all the slices needed for a comprehensive stack. Lanxon notes that if your camera doesn’t have focus bracketing, you can still achieve similar results manually by using burst mode and turning the focus ring in small increments. This flexibility is vital, whether your camera has automation features or not.
After capturing the images, Lanxon begins processing them in Lightroom, where he makes preliminary adjustments to exposure, contrast, and color to ensure consistency across the stack. He syncs these adjustments across all photos in the stack before exporting them as TIFF files. Lanxon emphasizes the need for a dedicated focus-stacking software, such as Helicon Focus, to handle the heavy load of hundreds of images. Although Photoshop has focus-stacking capabilities, he finds it unreliable when handling large stacks, often confusing which parts should be in focus. Helicon Focus, however, delivers consistent, high-quality results for these intricate compositions, making it worth the investment.
Once Helicon Focus has done the initial work of merging images, Lanxon moves to retouching. Here, he encounters common issues like slight halo effects around the subject due to focus breathing—a change that occurs as the lens refocuses at different depths. Lanxon shows how to use the retouching tab in Helicon Focus to brush in parts of individual source images, blending out these halos and creating a more polished look. He carefully chooses the sharpest edges from each source image, blending them seamlessly into the final composite.
For further refinement, Lanxon imports the final stack into Photoshop. Using tools like the clone stamp and brush, he cleans up minor imperfections, smooths background textures, and evens out color inconsistencies. He applies selective adjustments to the mushroom itself, adding slight boosts to clarity, contrast, and sharpness to bring out detail without affecting the background. This selective editing approach enhances the main subject, creating a stronger contrast between it and the out-of-focus areas. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Lanxon.
If you would like to continue learning about macro photography, be sure to check out "Mastering Macro Photography: The Complete Shooting and Editing Tutorial With Andres Moline!"
