Focus Stacking Using CombineZ

After trying out the Auto-Blending in Photoshop CS4 I wanted to compare this method with my other favorite focus stacking software CombineZ. There are quite a few tutorials out there on usage of the CombineZ. I highly recommend the great tutorial from Brian at Digital grin. Brian is one of the greatest Macro specialist I have seen. he as also a great teacher you can check his work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/ & http://www.lordv.smugmug.com

I tried the same set of files which were used for the Auto-Blending in Photoshop CS4 Tutorial. The result was far better with CombineZ. Also the alignment of the various layers was perfect in CombineZ, which in CS4 you need to run auto-align layers separately.

Then I tried manual hand stacking in CombineZ as well as CS4. This is a method which is well explained in CombineZ help file is useful when softwares find difficult to align several layers. CS4 does not provide any such method. If auto-blending is unsuccessful by cs4 there is very little you can do as the masks which are produced by CS4 are quite complicated. Here CombineZ wind hands down.

To conclude CS4 auto-blending is easy and quite fast, where as CombineZ produces far better result. CombineZ also allows manual stacking and to top it all it is free.

The beetle you see with this picture is the same set as my Auto-Blending in Photoshop CS4 Tutorial. Here I have used CombineZ to stack photos compare the photo with the one I posted here

The other day, I found a Long horned beetle clinging to the siding of my house. I grabbed my trusty Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens and my Feisol tripod. As I could not get all the parts of this beetle in focus I remembered the auto-align and auto-blend trick I had seen in the new Adobe Photoshop CS4. Previously I had tried focus stacking using freeware combinez5 which produced fantastic results. On the web I could get quite a few video tutorials like this and this, explaining their technique but there was dearth of written tutorials with pictures. Probably it is easier nowadays to create a video tutorial and post. So here is my humble effort to show you how I did this. I recommend that you download the latest update of Adobe Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 which updates and improves the quality of the results of Auto-Blend Layers.

I shot this beetle which was sitting on a white dining mat. As the depth field at 1:1 macro setting was too shallow. I took 10 sequential shots maintaining same exposure settings on a tripod but just altering the point of focus little by little. I usually start from the nearest point which I try to be in sharp focus then try little further until I reach the last shot which has the farthest point in focus. Best method to do this is fix the focus on the lens and move the camera little by little forward and keep taking pictures of different focus points. This avoids the geometric distortion all together. Make sure while doing so you make sure that the exposure, speed as well as focus all are locked. This needs a real steady hand or a focusing rail connected to the tripod head.

If you don’t have them then you can try getting the shots by fixing the camera on the tripod and altering focus of the lens by adjusting manual focus ring. Auto focus is a big NO for this technique. Now with Adobe Photoshop CS4 you can easily correct the geometric distortion introduced by adjusting manual focus.

Export from Lightroom to Layers in Photoshop

My work flow involves Adobe Lightroom 2.3 which manages all my files on my hard disk. Once you import the files from your card, select all the files which need to be blended and choose the option of edit in > Open as Layers in Photoshop. The step is same if you are using Bridge instead of Lightroom. Now Lightroom exports all the files to Photoshop into a single Photoshop document with multiple layers. Each layer consists of a single image. Here I have 10 images of this beetle consisting of various areas of  sharp focus resulting in 10 layers in the Photoshop document.

Select All Layers in Photoshop

In Photoshop choose Select > All Layers.

Choose Auto-Align Layers

Then choose Edit > Auto-Align Layers. The Auto-Align Layers dialog box opens.

Auto-Align Layer Dialog Box

Note: The Auto-Align Layers dialog box has a default Lens Correction setting of Geometric Distortion. This setting gives you the option of compensating for geometric distortion. In addition, the default Projection setting is Auto. When Auto is selected, Photoshop finds and compensates for certain kinds of lenses based on meta data information.

After Auto-Aligning Layers

Now click OK to view the Auto-Aligned composition. Now all the images are perfectly aligned. You might notice the edges of the picture seems warped this is because Adobe Photoshop has now corrected the geometric distortion.

Auto-Blend Layers

With all Layers still selected choose Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.

Auto-Blend Layers Dialog Box

Select Stack Images from the Auto-Blend dialog box. Leave Seamless Tones And Colors selected.
Click OK.

If we had not done auto-align before doing the auto-blend then the geometric distortion would be there in these images. And that gives a strange halo effect near the edge of the beetle. So it is always advisable to run auto-align before auto-blend.

Auto-Blend Layers Progress

When you turn on the layers, you can see that the images now contain deep focus with all the points in focus.

Cropping in Photoshop

Now its time to crop the edge so that main image looks clean. It also gets rid of the warped edges. Now its time to save the image and get back to Adobe Lightroom to further process if necessary. I found many a times the resulting image needs some exposure correction which can be easily done in Adobe Lightroom. Now here is the final image as exported from Adobe Lightroom.

Hope this tutorial was helpful, please ask me any steps if you have found difficult to follow. Please enter your valuable comments so that I can improve on my tutorial.

Long Horned Beetle

This Long Horned Beetle was photographed using the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens. I blended 6 shots which had different points of focus into a single using new auto-blend feature of Adobe Photoshop CS4. At 1:1 depth of field was minuscule. By using auto-blending I was able to acheive a perfectly clean image of the beetle with all the points in focus. I planning to present the tutorial on autoblending soon. Previously I had tried focus stacking using freeware combinez5 which produced fantastic results.

EDIT: Check out my post comapring CS4 auto-blending with CombineZ here

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended

New Adobe Photoshop CS4 has just been released (23rd Sep 2008). Even though it looks similar to CS3 there are lot of improvements. It has nicely evolved from CS3 incorporating quite a few new features. Here are few features I liked in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Adjustment Panel

To make work flow easier Adobe Photoshop CS4 now adds not just existing core adjustment features such as Levels, Hue/Saturation, Exposure, Black and White, Channel Mixer, Selective Color, Color Balance, Photo Filter, but a completely revised version of the Curves feature and a brand new Vibrance adjustment tool. All of them are now presented in a single panel which will provide both efficiency and quality gains way beyond the effort needed to get over the initial hump in the CS4 learning curve.

Graphic card powered display
Photoshop CS4 makes use of the awesome power of the modern graphics card to help display pixels on screen. Users with graphics card containing at least 256Mb of on board memory and a supported GPU will be able to take advantage of the changes which include:

• Fluid Canvas Rotation
• Smooth Accurate Pan and Zoom functions
• Animated Zoom and Toss (carrousal view) functions

Content Aware Scaling Before

Masks Panel
This new panel has dedicated sliders for altering the density and feather of a mask which in turn will change the strength of the masked effect and the softness of the mask’s edge. The powerful Refine Edge feature can also be accessed from the panel, along with the Invert feature that switches masked and unmasked areas.

Mask Panel

Content Aware Scaling feature
You can now push and pull different image parts around the canvas and have Photoshop fill in the gaps. It is now possible to move, stretch and resize different sections of your photo at different rates. This is drastically different from the Free Transform command, which when used in conjunction with the Shift key always resizes all picture content at the same rate. The image is scaled by keeping detailed areas the same and up or downsizing the parts of the photo that are feature less.

Content Aware Scaling After

Maximum depth of field
The layer auto-blending options in Photoshop gets an extra mode designed to combine photos of the same scene but with different focus points to create an image with extreme depth of field (DOF). The result displays the visual sharpness from the very front of the scene right into the distance. Using this new feature you can capture a series of images of a subject with a wide aperture, that typically produces a shallow depth of field effect, and combine the results to create a photo that combines the DOF of all source photos. This feature automatically color corrects the source files while blending as well.

Auto- Blending

Improved Photomerge
The feature can now create 360 degree panoramas, automatically detect source images taken with fisheye lenses and has a new Collage option which allows for rotation and scaling of source files as they are being montaged.

Adobe Camera Raw 5.0
Looking identical to the Lightroom 2.0 featurewise the new camera raw 5.0 gets the two key very popular localized adjustment tools found in Lightroom, the Adjustment Brush and Graduated Filter. Also new for this release is the ability to apply Vignetting changes to images after they have been cropped in ACR. This solves the problem of applying aesthetic darkening of a photos edge to only have the effect cropped, or worse, partially removed when the photo is cropped.

Integration with Lightroom 2.0
Now you can freely pass your Raw photos between Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop with the changes being respected in each program. Lightroom 2.0 also includes more ways to pass photos to Photoshop. You now have the option to open a Lightroom managed file in Photoshop as an embedded Smart Object. You can also pass a series of photos to the Merge to HDR or Photomerge features.

Dodge, Burn and Sponge tools
Burn and Dodge get a new Protect Tones option designed to reduce the muddiness that plagued so much of their work previously. The Sponge tool comes back with the addition of a Vibrance switch which converts from making basic saturation changes to concentrating adjustments on pastel or desaturated colors.

Live Preview Cursor Tips
The Clone Stamp and Healing Brush now display a preview of the sampled image at the cursor tip. This provided the user with much needed visual information when trying to line up sampled image parts with background information during stamping actions.

Transformation of Smart Objects
In CS4 you can now apply Perspective transformations to a Smart Object. There is the ability to work with linked layer masks and sample the content of the layers within the Smart Object with the new Eyedropper tool.

3D Editing and Compositing
The new and enhanced 3D tools found in Photoshop CS4 Extended are designed to work with 3D images just as easily as the 2D pictures. New workflows allow you to interact directly with 3D models and easily composite these models within 2D scenes. Users are now able to edit properties such as lights, materials and cameras, and in the process create high quality rendered images thanks to a new ray-tracing engine.

Enhanced Multimedia Capabilities
CS4 Extended increases the ease with which videographers are able to drag motion based images into Photoshop and provides them with more of the type of tools they need to work on these frames. Photoshop can now work more easily with non-square pixels, any audio associated with video footage, and it is also possible to animate 3d objects, camera position, render settings and even cross-sections.

I have been dormant from blogging for a long time. Last one year has been quite a refreshing one. Photography has become a major part in my life. It was all because of the purchase of the DSLR camera Canon EOS 40D. I was happy shooting from bridge camera till then but it never used to give me the satisfaction that a SLR could give. So camera ended as just a point and shoot stuff till last year. With purchase of 40D in January all this changed. I could get results out of the camera as I wanted.

Last 8 months were used to master both the camera as well as post processing techniques using Photoshop CS3 & Lightroom.

Now it is exciting to hear that new camera from Canon is on the horizon Canon EOS 5D mark II. Also out is the new version of Photoshop called Adobe photoshop CS4. All these have technology so interesting that they are going to revolutionize the way we percive photography.

I plan to restart my blog which will now focus on these topics. So until next time see yaa