I can never get enough from cross-processing images (or HDR images, for that matter). I’ve done a focus-stacking mini-tutorial before, and I know there’s only so many times you can do a tutorial, so I won’t explain everything in detail again, but I still wanted to show this example with another subject/object than a flower.

A week or so ago I posted some pictures of a water tap with a droplet falling. I took a good number of shots, and I thought it’d be a nice one to do a focus stacking with. The nice thing about that image -I think- was the narrow DoF, and that was at the same time the pain in the ass, because it made focusing really critical. Since with a subject like this it’s impossible to get everything in focus in one shot, I took a series of shots and put them together in Photoshop (CS6, I upgraded! And loving it! 🙂 ).

Here are the originals:

D800, ISO1600-ISO3200, 1/350 sec @ f/3.8-4.5, Tamron 90mm macro, 2x off-camera SB-800

I messed around with it a bit. Typically you *should* keep the settings the same and just refocus (and basically the whole thing is underexposed with 1,5-2 stops, but well… New camera, great low-light performance, etc. etc. Need to do some testing every now and again.

Brought them all into Photoshop and after it (the focus stacking) and I (the necessary exposure, contrast and color adjustments) did the work, the layer palette looked like this:

The layer palette in Photoshop CS6

And the final result; quite a bit different, I can say, isn’t it?

The end result after all the hard work