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Over the past few years, focus stacking has gone from a niche, little-known trick used in macro photography to an everyday technique called upon by all kinds of photographers, from those shooting architecture to landscapes, product photography, fine art and more.
There are two key benefits to focus stacking. The first is the obvious one. It lets us expand our depth of field beyond the capabilities of our camera and lens. By shooting a series of frames while incrementally adjusting the focus point, we can record sharp details across the entire scene from front to back. Merging these photos is easy with the Affinity Photo Focus Merge command. This combines the sharp parts from each frame and lets us manually perfect any mistakes in the blend.
The second benefit is perhaps less obvious, but could be just as important to landscape photographers. Lots of us tend to use narrow apertures such as f/16 for landscapes as this leads to greater depth of field. But at these narrow apertures, diffraction comes into play and fine details render a little more softly. Every lens has an aperture at which it is sharpest, and by utilizing focus stacking, we have the luxury of choosing it. This ‘sweet spot’ is usually a couple of stops down from the maximum aperture of the lens, so if the maximum is f/4, the sweet spot is around f/8. A wide aperture means less depth of field, but if we shoot for a focus-stack, we can shoot more frames then blend them. Here’s how…
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