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.