Focus Stacking in Photoshop - Horrible Results

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
March 26, 2017
返信数 4.
10310 ビュー

Hello. I've been attempting to use Photoshop CC to stack images. I have a camera that can utilize focus bracketing.

I recently tried to stack 99 focus bracketed images, with a very small focus differential, with horrible results in Photoshop CC. The process was: 1) auto-align; 2) auto-blend; 3) flatten layers.

Below is the result of my stacked image. The result should have been a sharp picture from front to back. What I got was gobs of blur everywhere. Wasn't expecting such poor results from Adobe.

Please, if anyone has any useful input/advice, I'd be very grateful!

解決に役立った回答 D Fosse

Yes, I can confirm this. Focus stacking in Photoshop could use some more work. If you do a lot of this you might want to look at specialist software.

http://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconsoft-products/helicon-focus/

http://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker

R

raminolta

Participating Frequently

It's almost 2026 and Photoshop focus stacking is still horrible. With all these new AI tools, I hope they start applying them to their focus stacking algorythms to imrove the tool.

I still use the tool but often I have to manually bring up some of the images , realign them and use masking to cover the areas that are poorly done by Photoshop. However, this is can be very time consuming.

There may be some simple remdies that Adobe can apply to improve the tool. As of its current design, it has no features or adjustment parameters. For example, if the tool could give me the option to choose which area of the scene is my priority for focus stacking, that may help a lot. Example: I have a butterfly sitting on a flower in the scene. If I can tell Photshop my priority is to have the buterfly correctly aligned and in focus not the flower or any other subject in the scene, that may yield a better output. Aother impovement would be implementaotin of the Transform Tool into focus stacking. Because some layers may need to be moified by the functions of the transform tool (scale, skew, warp, etc.) in order to be possible to match them with the rest.

rayek.elfin

Legend

A free open-source focus stacking tool that produces as good results as Helicon is found here:

https://github.com/PetteriAimonen/focus-stack

Good options as well. The only drawback (if one can call it a drawback) is that it is command line only.

Available for all major platforms.

SdeGat

Inspiring

Just tried focus stacking with Photoshop 2021 and it is still bad.

I think Photoshop CS6 was actually better at it...

I

imontv08

Known Participant

It sure is, looks like it's totally broken. The results are simply unusable. I just tried a focus stack with Photoshop and then Affinity Photo... the latter produced much better, almost perfect results from the same stack of images.

abeaulieu

Participating Frequently

Well phew! I guess it's not just me then. First time using auto blend, ever, and am not impressed with results. 11 pic stack and in some areas just odd random blurry spots. Searched pics and there is in fact a sharp section there.
first pic is initial result - looks good until you zoom in a little (second pic where stem meets the leaf) & there are patches like this throughout.

I also figured I could go into the individual masks and paint out or in some areas, but the masks appear uneditable..?? Nothing I do changes them.
Been using photoshop for 15+ yrs & can't figure out if it's something I'm doing wrong or it's a feature issue with auto blend.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

You can fine tune by not flattening, and manually masking in the bits you want.

Work out the layer you need; copy it and move to the top of the stack.

Fill the mask with black, and paint in the 'in focus' area in the mask.

Are you using a script to do the focus stack, or loading the files into layers, and Auto Align layers, followed by Auto blend layers (with seamless tones and colours checked? If you are doing it manually then fine tuning is not hard to do.

A tip for finding the right area would be to select the Move tool, and Ctrl Clicking a sharp area on the same horizontal to the OOF area.