@jamesaphoto www.jamesaphoto.co.uk
apturing landscapes that are pin-sharp from just centimetres in front of the camera all the way to the distant horizon may sound like the stuff of dreams, but it’s a technique you can use right now to capture landscapes with maximum detail throughout.
Focus stacking is a technique that’s more commonly associated with macro photography, because it overcomes the problem of an extremely shallow depth of field, even when shooting with a macro lens stopped down to f/11, for instance.
With landscape photography, the foreground interest may be less than a metre away from the lens, while the horizon may be several miles away. And the problem with stopping down the aperture to f/22 to achieve a large depth of field is that diffraction – basically a loss of overall image sharpness – becomes a problem.
When focus-stacking landscapes, you shoot at your lens’s sweet spot of f/8 or f/11, and take three or four shots focused at different points through the scene, but close enough together that the depth of field, or the sharpest parts of each image, overlap one another from one shot to the next. The result is the sharpest image your lens is capable of producing, because the exposures were shot at the sharpest aperture of your lens, alongside a depth of field that’s much greater than you could ever achieve in a single shot, even at f/22.
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PROCESS THE FIRST IMAGE
Rate your three or four shots with five stars in Lightroom so you can easily identify them, then click on the first image to make it active and apply all adjustments required to process the image. Get the image to the point where you would normally export the image to share, print or continue editing in Photoshop.
AUTO-BLEND LAYERS SYNCHRONISE SETTINGS
With the first image still active, hold down Shift and left-click on the last image of the set. Click on the Sync button on the right, and when the dialog opens click Check All then Synchronize. Finally, check the Exposure in each image, and adjust any as required so that exposure is identical in each image.
THE IMAGE OPEN AS LAYERS
Keep all the images active, right-click on them and go to Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop. When the images load, hold down Shift and left-click on the bottom layer to select all the layers. Now go to Edit > Auto-Align Layers, and make sure Auto is selected and that the Lens Correction options are unchecked.
SAVE THE IMAGE
Click on the menu icon at the top-right of the Layers panel and select Flatten Image.
You can now apply any final image editing or adjustments using layers to finish your image, after which you can either save the image as a TIFF and reduce the bit depth to 8 bits/channel or simply save as a JPEG.
DR photography needs little or no introduction these days, but for those unfamiliar with the technique it’s a method of capturing tonal detail in a scene from the deepest shadows through to the brightest highlights by shooting three, five or more bracketed exposures. The exposures are shot at two-stop increments if you’re shooting three or five shots, or one-stop increments if you’re shooting more exposures.
HThese frames are then merged into a single image in which detail is revealed throughout the scene.
The advantage of HDR photography is that it can eliminate the need to use ND grad filters, but it can also be used in conjunction with filters to tackle extremely high-contrast scenes in which the sky is considerably brighter than the foreground.
The main issue with HDR photography comes down to editing.
The technique has gained a bad reputation, because poor processing technique can result in muddy midtones and the introduction of artefacts such as halos along high-contrast subject edges. The trick is to process HDR images in such a way that the application of the technique looks natural, and is essentially invisible to the viewer – this easily achieved, and it’s what we’re going to focus on in our next tutorial