Stacking Images

[topcatproduction]

First post in this section I believe- slowly getting into the pp side of photography and realising it's potential.

I enjoy close up macro photography, but not being able to afford the MPE-65 I'm stuck with using a reversed 28mm prime on tubes for maximum magnification, the obvious problem with magnification of this level is the paper thin DOF. I've seen an example of a stacked image from many shots, can someone explain how I would do this?!

I know I will need a macro rail which I dont have yet, and I use cs3 but thats as much as I know!

 

[vaizki]

You basically take a large number of shots with the focus changing so that the shots cover the whole DoF that you want sharp. These are then fed into a piece of magic software that matches the pics with each other to align them and picks the pixels from each frame so that everything is sharp.

How it does this (contrast detection?).. I don't know. But it works

 

[Chappers]

Photoshop CS4 will image stack, the alternative is Helicon Focus which many consider to be superior.

You could also try Combine ZM

here's a link

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/CombineZM-Download-78530.html

 

[topcatproduction]

So with the right software it really is that easy? Thanks!