Focus Stacking images

I recently attended ASMP’s meeting “Foto Tech’s Top 12 Technologies for Photographers.  After Michael Stewart’s excellent presentation I decided to test one I had not used.

@DBMC needed a photograph of her coffee mug for her blog.   She was not sure whether she wanted the image softly focused or full of depth and sharp.    I bought a copy of Helicon Focus software that allows you to “focus stack” images which means the program creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas.   The software was easy to learn and allowed me to offer a variety of different images from the same shoot.

I shot 4 different images with a slightly different focus for each of the images on the left I created.  The image on the right is from just one shot.

Here are the results:

Michael Stewart\’s blog