Quote:
Originally Posted by thegunshow
What is it all about and how do i use it to make my photos better?
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There are different kinds of "photo stacking".
For example some people used to sandwich slides together to view 2 pictures as one....maybe take a picture of a texture and overlay it over portrait or something. I doubt that's what you meant but it's there FYI anyway.
With digital there are a number of was of stacking images. In astrophotography exposure stacking is sometimes used - take several underexposed images of the same subject and then combine the exposures to make 1 correctly exposed image.
As with Wulf I suspect you meant focus stacking. In focus stacking you take several correctly exposed images of the same subject but move the focus between each shot. Later the shots are combined so you take the sharp bits of each shot to make 1 shot with much more in focus that can otherwise be achieved.
These are two different shots but hopefully close enough to illustrate the technique. The first shot is a single exposure of some fungi - the balls were about 1-2mm in diameter so this was shot at a fairly high magnification (about 4x lifesize at the sensor).
As you can see the DoF is very limited. This is due to shooting at such a high magnification even although I was using a tripod and could stop down as much as I like. At that magnification that's pretty much as much DoF as the laws of physics allow (while retaining good image quality!).
To get round that limitation I used a focus rail to move the focus between shots. The below image is a focus stack created from more than a dozen images like the above:
If you'd like to have a go at this technique you could try doing the stacking in software like CombineZM - it's free but I think it may be PC only. Good luck and have fun
