Group Since Jul 9, 2005
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Example of focus stacking by hand in Photoshop.
To do this I simply load the shots I want to use into photoshop and choose the healing brush with about an 80 pixel diameter (this does depend on how big an area you are copying). Choose the master shot ie the shot you are copying too and one of the donor photos.
Simply ALT left click on a recognisable spot in the area you want to copy on the donor pic and then locate the cursor over the same spot on the master pic and hold the left mouse button down. As long as you keep the mouse button depressed, you can paint in the detail from the donor pic to the master pic. When you release the mouse button PS will blend the painted area in.
I tend to do this in small areas . If you find the alignment or sizing is not correct then stop- use EDIT/undo and see how the size or orientation changes. You can the correct orientation by rotating the donor pic and correct a size error by just changing the size of the donor pic (I do this most convenianty by changing the DPI by + or - 5 to 10 from 300DPI). When you have done that just try again.
You can sometimes get odd effects on compound eye detail with some blotching appearing after the shots blends. You can cure this by going over the affected area using the clone brush rather than the healing tool but you may need to colour/tone match the donor pic to the master before trying this.
The other problem you can get is when you use the healing brush near a high contrast boundary can cause the blend to come out lighter or darker than it should. You can get round this by copying from both sides of the contrast boundary or by careful use of the clone tool instead of the healing brush.
The shots below are just a sequence in doing a simple 2 shot stack of a Hylaeus bee with the master shot on the right and the donor shot on the left.
You can see the full finished shot here farm5.static.flickr.com/4037/4697024859_2d066c7cbc_b.jpg
Brian V.


To do this I simply load the shots I want to use into photoshop and choose the healing brush with about an 80 pixel diameter (this does depend on how big an area you are copying). Choose the master shot ie the shot you are copying too and one of the donor photos.
Simply ALT left click on a recognisable spot in the area you want to copy on the donor pic and then locate the cursor over the same spot on the master pic and hold the left mouse button down. As long as you keep the mouse button depressed, you can paint in the detail from the donor pic to the master pic. When you release the mouse button PS will blend the painted area in.
I tend to do this in small areas . If you find the alignment or sizing is not correct then stop- use EDIT/undo and see how the size or orientation changes. You can the correct orientation by rotating the donor pic and correct a size error by just changing the size of the donor pic (I do this most convenianty by changing the DPI by + or - 5 to 10 from 300DPI). When you have done that just try again.
You can sometimes get odd effects on compound eye detail with some blotching appearing after the shots blends. You can cure this by going over the affected area using the clone brush rather than the healing tool but you may need to colour/tone match the donor pic to the master before trying this.
The other problem you can get is when you use the healing brush near a high contrast boundary can cause the blend to come out lighter or darker than it should. You can get round this by copying from both sides of the contrast boundary or by careful use of the clone tool instead of the healing brush.
The shots below are just a sequence in doing a simple 2 shot stack of a Hylaeus bee with the master shot on the right and the donor shot on the left.
You can see the full finished shot here farm5.static.flickr.com/4037/4697024859_2d066c7cbc_b.jpg
Brian V.


Matty7D
13 years ago
Just out of curiosity, is there a benefit to doing this manually over automated stacking via Photoshop or similar?
Matt - I do this sometimes for various reasons.
1. An insect has moved something so I know I will end up with a gross duplication or worse with an automated focus stack.
2. I want to only focus stack specific parts of the picture - often this is to keep the background bokeh.
3. I know that focus stacking progs will in some circumstances cause quite a few errors and it comes a moot point whther it's faster to stack the shots manually or spend the time to clean up the focus stack which often involves a similar technique.
4. Noise - most focus stacking progs increase the noise in the photos (ie they stack the noise as well as detail) this can be a problem in natural light focus stacks so I often stack them by hand to avoid this.
5. For some simple focus stacks I just find this faster to do it by hand eg the above example where I was really just stacking the facial detail.
Brian V.
1. An insect has moved something so I know I will end up with a gross duplication or worse with an automated focus stack.
2. I want to only focus stack specific parts of the picture - often this is to keep the background bokeh.
3. I know that focus stacking progs will in some circumstances cause quite a few errors and it comes a moot point whther it's faster to stack the shots manually or spend the time to clean up the focus stack which often involves a similar technique.
4. Noise - most focus stacking progs increase the noise in the photos (ie they stack the noise as well as detail) this can be a problem in natural light focus stacks so I often stack them by hand to avoid this.
5. For some simple focus stacks I just find this faster to do it by hand eg the above example where I was really just stacking the facial detail.
Brian V.
Overread2000
13 years ago
Interesting point about noise LordV because your experience is different to mine - when I've used something like combineZP and ZM the amount of noise in the final stacked shot was always significantly less than in the original image.
Overread - this might depend on the shots but more likely the stacking prog. Zerene stacker is much better at keeping low contrast detail than the combine series but I suspect that also includes noise :)
Brian v.
Brian v.
Matty7D
13 years ago
Interesting points, thanks for the tips. I really want to try stacking more, but getting multiple shots is a bit of a struggle. It's winter now, so there aren't many bugs to experiment on either :o(
Tom_1903
13 years ago
To those of you that have photoshop this may seem like a basic question but I've never had it. What does the "Heal brush" do different from a clone brush? Does it just tranfer stuff from one picture to another?
Tom - I'm certainly not an expert PS user but both the clone tool and healing brush transfer the selected areas but the healing brush does a good attempt at blending the result to the surrounding colour etc.
Brian v.
Brian v.