Focus stacking fail - Focus breathing?

gad-westy

gad-westy

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Graham
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Took some images this morning with the intention of stacking them. Used the Nikon 70-200 VR2 lens which is notorious for focus breathing.

Now that I come to stack them, I'm getting all sorts of soft edges and I'm wondering if it's because PS cannot deal with the breathing when it is trying to auto align.

My process is pretty basic:

Basic edits in LR synced accross all images to stacked.
Open stack as layers in PS
Auto align layers (auto projection)
Auto Blend Layers (stack images - seamless tones and colours)

What I'm seeing is lots of soft edge areas. You can see it on the blended example particularly around the top of some of the posts. (last image)

Any tips on avoiding this?

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The lack of contrast/"features" and the complex shape of the post means you need to do some manual blending, there's no sure fire way to do it. Focus stacking is actually extremely complex, from a Computer Graphics point of view. If you look at the images where the ocean is out of focus and in focus, they look very similar.

If you have TS lens it's just a simple swing...
 
It might be worth downloading Helicon Focus and seeing what it makes of it. They give a 30 day trial and this should show you whether it's an error during capture or a PS limitation.

Bob
 
I had a problem with focus stacking and photoshop some time ago see thread https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/solving-a-problem-with-focus-stacking-fusion.687369/ Photoshop seems to very much take it or leave it with very few options. however it usually does a good job aligning images. so i ended up aligning my images with photoshop and stacking them in TuFuse pro which is a less expensive stacking program.
EDIT: If I was serious about stacking I would use Helicon Focus.
 
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As Steven and Terry have said, Photoshop really does struggle with certain stacks, another vote too for Helicon Focus...
 
Cheers folks. Much to consider!

I'm giving Helicon focus a quick try as we speak but I am still seeing some weird edge issues. In this instance the edges of the posts are much better but they have huge haloes around them. I haven't really played around with setting yet though so I'll keep playing.

A tilt shift lens would be lovely but I actually hardly ever shoot like this and most of my stacked shots work perfectly in PS it just seems that shooting quite long on this occasion has thrown it.
 
sk66 said:
IDT a tilt shift wouldn't really help here... you could lay the focus plane down along the surface, but that wouldn't retain the poles vertically.
Click to expand...

Absolutely, when you lay the plane of focus down, depth of field remains 90 degrees to it. So in this shot where the groins run vertically top to bottom, the depth of field, even at small apertures, would be totally insufficient. Only a section in the middle of them would be sharp.
However a better compromise would to be to use side swing where you could bring the groins and light into sharp focus but there would be a horizontal fall of in depth of field.
 
Terrywoodenpic said:
However a better compromise would to be to use side swing where you could bring the groins and light into sharp focus but there would be a horizontal fall of in depth of field.
Click to expand...
Can't say for certain, but IDT you would be able to keep the far lighthouse in focus; maybe with a wider FL and small aperture as well... and a lot of fiddling, zooming in, scrolling up/down...
 
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