Focus Stacking in Photoshop - Horrible Results

[ronaldl54466383]

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!

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

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

[Trevor.Dennis]

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.

[D Fosse]

Yeah, you can do it manually, but with 99 layers I'd rather not

[SdeGat]

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

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

[imontv08]

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]

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. 

[D Fosse]

Searched pics and there is in fact a sharp section there. 

By @abeaulieu

Yes, that's just it. Sharp areas are thrown out, and that's a problem.

It should be clear that close blurry areas will overlap sharp areas that are farther away. This is just a function of moving the lens optical center to focus. The only way to avoid that is to use a focusing rail so that the lens stays fixed, while the camera body and focus plane is moved.

But still, Photoshop overdoes it and throws away sharp areas. It should perhaps even be possible to apply a correction to those edge areas, just "normalizing" contrast would go a long way. This is probably what other software does.

[abeaulieu]

Point being: Heliocon did it once and it was perfect. I expect more from the leader, Adobe. 
these forums only exist for us anyway - adobe isnt listening. 

[raminolta]

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]

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.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Seeing that this is such an old thread, I am going to tag @davescm because he has done a lot of work with focus stacking since this thread was posted.  Note: He does not use Photoshop.  I don't think he is using Helicon Focus either, but I can't remember which one he finally chose.  

[davescm]

Thanks Trevor. I tested a few options for photography using a microscope, but also tried them with other stacks. I settled on Zerene Stacker which works very well for me. 

Both Zerene and Helicon offer a trial period, so can be tested with your own images.

Dave

[raminolta]

I just tried Helicon. The result is attached. I am impressed. It turned my butter-fly into butters-flies, lol. 

OK, joking aside, it seems Helcon does not have any alignment function. In order to use Helicon, all the pictures must be perfect match except for the focus. The group of photos to which I applied Helicon, was the result of handheld bracketing and me trying to move back and forth slightly. In the macro realm, this movement creates quite a bit of shift not just in focus but also in composition, scale, etc. At least Photoshop has an alignment function which can be applied to photos before applying the focusing stacking. Noprmally, it does a good job though not perfect. I looked around in Helicon and coulnd't find any alignment function. Did I miss it?

I guess I must tone down my over-expectations and, I think there is really no point trying other software. I can still do this manually. It just takes a lot of time (I have done it before).

[davescm]

As I said earlier in the thread, I tested both Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker before choosing Zerene for my purposes. That said, Helicon does have align functions and allows you to change the auto-adjustment parameters in preferences, in this case the horizontal and vertical adjustment limits. Normally, with a still subject and a camera attached to a tripod, movement is small between each frame. Your image shows quite extensive movement between frames so the default settings may not be able to align. Try adjusting those defaults.

Dave