From the course: Photoshop Layers: Working with Multiple Photos (2018)

Blending the focus stacked image - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop Layers: Working with Multiple Photos (2018)

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Blending the focus stacked image

“

- Once you have all of the layers loaded, it's a good idea to save your document. And then you can invoke a new command to actually blend it together. Photoshop can analyze each layer and automatically pick up the sharp details that it wants to keep. Let's start by saving this file. And I'm just going to call this Loaded. I had already saved it earlier, but you can save it into the project folder. Make sure you capture that with layers intact. Once it's captured, you'll want to select all of the layers in the Layers Panel. So click on the bottom-most layer. Scroll to the top. And while holding the Shift key, click again so that multiple layers are selected. Now, from the Edit menu, I can choose Auto-Blend Layers. If for some reason you forgot to do the alignment option when you loaded them into a stack, you can also choose to Auto-Align the layers first. Now, what I'll do is choose Auto-Blend Layers. This brings up a new dialogue. What's important here is you take a look at what needs to happen to fill everything in. For example, we're going to stack the images to create one new images. And this is going to blend them together. This works best for aligned images shot on a tripod. Now, I don't have any change in tone or color, but if you didn't have the camera in manual mode, you might want to choose the Seamless Tone and Colors option. When I shot, I was shooting truly manual. That's because this particular lens was a manual prime lens. And this is how I prefer to shoot focus stacking. But depending upon the lens you have and the camera that you're using, there might be subtle variations from shot to shot. This is why the auto option to blend tone and color is so important. When ready, click the OK button, and let Photoshop analyze each layer. It's going to evaluate each photo layer and find the in-focus areas that it thinks are worth keeping. Then it will automatically generate a mask and attempt to blend those together smoothly. This is a lot of math and processing here, so it may take a minute or two. Now, you'll notice that each layer has a new mask added. Let's evaluate these here. We'll turn everything off and start at the bottom. In this case, it latched onto different areas in focus. Now you can see, because the images were scaled, it had to start to take a little bit of the outside edge as well. And in this case, no surprise, the further-away images are in focus. As we start to combine these, you'll see they build up. And naturally, the image starts to emerge. Now, you might detect, if you zoom in, a few small holes in the mat. This is just temporary. Photoshop will eventually fill these in. But if you want, you could paint on the individual mask using the white paintbrush to fill that in. But you'll see quickly that these details should become totally filled-in as the image evolves. As we move up in the stack here, you'll notice that more and more details become sharp. And the image fills in the rest of the way. Now, this is pretty amazing in that, if you look at this image, the first teacup and the last teacup are in focus. And we have a sharp mat all the way down. I shot this at f/18, plenty of depth of field when shooting. But because we were so close, it was impossible to keep everything in focus. But now, thanks focus stacking, we have just that; an image with perfect focus throughout. Now that we have our composited image, let's take a look at a few more things to finish it out.

Contents