October at this place on the river always has something new for me. This time the morning was cold and the fog had lifted. The curves and dew of these grass blades intrigued me. I knew it would be a monochrome photo. Used focus stacking to isolate the grasses from the busy background. Should have let the R5 take all the slices it wanted to, but adjusted focus distance manually. Plenty of choices are available for crop, rotation, and flip; this is where I am today. Re-post is in response to Kristin’s help.
Specific Feedback Requested
Any comments are very welcome. Certainly about choices for cropping, etc.
I like the sweeping nature of the grasses, so I don’t think I’d crop more. Did you play with darkening and/or blurring the background more? The stack though…I don’t think it was successful. Lots of gaps and blurs. And sharpening artifacts in the bg. What software did you use for it and how many images? Sometimes by eliminating some from the total I can come up with something workable. Looks like there might have been movement that the software couldn’t overcome.
Wow, Kristin, Thank You.
You are right on point: the technical flaws really get in the way of presenting the lines that I enjoy. Most of the flaws cannot be blamed on the stacking software, but on careless implementation.
Re-post is from another sequence of 8 exposures, original was 6.
Much more attention to masking to separate the BG (which was blurred and darkened), so less slopover of BG treatment onto subject in the re-post.
Next chance at a focus stack photo, I will let the R5 take all the exposures it wants to.
Applied and refined PShop’s Select > Focus Area … a nice new tool.
Grass is hard. I’ve done it and it’s a retouching nightmare. You need a lot more images than you think and the least movement is apparent and will wreck your stack. At f/3.2 the need for many more images for the stack is greater than at double or triple that because the DOF becomes impossibly thin. You also have to take into consideration the distance the lens is traveling between focus points. If I were to try this I’d probably do a few things
get a dedicated stacker - Photoshop is not the best tool for this
take a lot more images - 20, 30, 40 - whatever you need to get the main areas of grass in focus. It’s far better to have more than you need than not enough.
up my aperture a bit - depending on how the background looks. With raindrops in the bg it can work depending on how the aperture blades in your lens render bokeh balls
do multiple stacks starting and ending with different focus areas
retouch like crazy and probably slabbing will help for not only the stacks, but more importantly the retouching. Zerene does slabbing internally and automatically and for anything over 20 shots in a stack I use it. Slabbing is basically making substacks and then stacking those instead of trying to do dozens and dozens at once and having to sort through a ton of source images for retouching.
oh and I’d also do a combination of DMap and PMax for maximum detail and smoothness of color and background.
Stacking is a crazy, but really wonderful technique that takes a LOT of practice. Here are links to a couple of discussions that might help -
