#Focus stacking darktable software

For a lot of lenses, this sweet spot will be somewhere from f/4 to f/8. However, there’s also a second reason why some photographers focus stack, and it’s equally valid.īecause all lenses have a sweet spot, there will be an aperture that gives you the sharpest possible photo. In fact, I shoot most of my focus stacks at f/16, since it means that I don’t have to take as many photos (more on that later). Again, even an aperture of f/16 may not give you enough depth of field.įor me, that’s the most common time that I use focus stacking - when there’s no other way to get enough depth of field. Because they have such a thin depth of field, telephoto lenses will cause some blurriness in all but the most distant landscapes. You’ll also run into sharpness problems when you use telephoto lenses for landscape photography. This can happen if your foreground is very close to your camera - there’s just no way to capture a focused foreground and background in one shot (even at small apertures like f/16). In other words, some parts of the scene are too close to your camera, and they’re out-of-focus if you shoot just a single photo. There are two main reasons why you might want to focus stack a landscape photo.įirst, you could be photographing a landscape that has too much depth. However, if you only do occasional focus stacking, Photoshop’s tools should be fine. I use Photoshop, since that’s what I already own, but there are better programs out there if you do a lot of focus stacking - Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker being the two main products.

#Focus stacking darktable software

You can focus stack with any lens and camera, but you need to have the right post-processing software to combine the photos together. (The latest installment in “Spencer can’t draw, but a diagram here would be useful.”) Then, you can take the best parts of each photo and combine them into a fully-focused image. For example, you may take three photos at a particular scene: one focused on the foreground, another on the middle-ground, and a third on the background.

Focus stacking is an interesting development of digital photography, and, more specifically, digital post-processing.įocus stacking lets you take several photos of a landscape, focused at different points, and combine them together into the sharpest possible image.