Photography: Focus Stacking

[ReducedAirFact]

I've been designing Shapeways models for several months, but I've always thought the photos of my models were pretty underwhelming. In the interest of convenience, I was taking them with a handheld compact camera on macro setting with overhead lighting, and they usually came out something like this:


What I wanted was something like this, with the model sharp and in focus from one wingtip to another.


The first step was to use a better camera. I know that's not always an option, but if it's available, it can sure help. This picture with a Canon 60D with a 50mm macro lens and an flash pointed at the ceiling:

It's certainly an improvement, but the wingtips and tail are still blurry, even with the lens stopped down to f/16. The enemy is depth of field -- the zone in which the picture is sharp, which gets worse the closer you are to the model and the wider your aperture is open.

One easy solution -- if you have a lot of megapixels -- is just to step back, turn up the lighting to maximum, and crop the result down. Your plane will only be a small part of your picture, but that's no problem if you're cropping it to 300-600 pixels wide anyway. But you don't get that "up close" feel.

Technology to the rescue! There is a technique called "focus stacking" where you take a succession of pictures -- the first with the closest foreground in sharpest focus, the next moving the focus a little more to the background, the next a little further, etc, until you've taken several pictures covering the whole topic. Then you employ a little computer magic to blend the sharpest parts of each of those pictures together, and you end up with a picture that's in focus from front to back.

Here's an example, using Nexus 1/144 RE8. I'll show just three pictures to illustrate. The first with the foreground in focus, then central, then the far wingtip. The in-focus area may be easier to spot on the grass than on the plane itself.


After computer processing, here is the final result. (I actually used about 10 shots rather than three, but don't want to post them all.)


Another example, this time with a 1/300 Ros&Heroics Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI (which is larger than many 1/144 planes!):


With the result:


And of course, afterwards you can add a background and have other fun. (1/144 Voisin 8 Ca2 Shapeways)


1/285 CinC Albatros D.Va:


1/285 CinC Fokker D.VII:


I'm far from an expert on photography and focus stacking, but from the results I've seen so far, it's pretty exciting stuff. (Yes, the 1/285 miniatures are all hand-painted...they're from the era before decal printing, and they're half the scale you're used to seeing. So the lines are a touch wobbly and the hexes are approximate.)

Details: Canon 60D with 50mm Compact Macro Lens at f/16; 320EX flash with white diffuser aimed at ceiling; Software: Canon EOS Remote Control and Helicon Focus

[pstapleton53]

Wow! Very good info and some spectacular 1/285 minis. Thank you for sharing.

[Flying Officer Kyte]

What an interesting article Daryl. I will have to give that a whirl myself. I always get focusing problems when shooting formations of aircraft. Rob.

[Lt. S.Kafloc]

Any special photo programme or do most, ie photoshop, have this facility?

[Guntruck]

That's certainly worth knowing Daryl. And good job on the painting

[diceslinger]

My google-fu turned up this link http://digital-photography-school.co...focus-stacking It tells how you do this easy style in photoshop. Is says Photoshop CS4, but I have the menu items in CS3.
I also found a blog for instructions on using two open source programs http://blog.patdavid.net/2013/01/foc...os-enfuse.html
Hope this helps!

[redcoon2]

Very excellent photo-montage...thank you for sharing your efforts and process. Will be well worth a few attempts.

[Zoe Brain]

You.
Hand
Painted
Lozenge
In
One
Three-hundredth.


GRONK.

[ReducedAirFact]

Thanks for the painting kudos...I think my hand isn't as steady today as when I first painted those. :-)
As for software...I'm using Helicon Focus, but I know some versions of Photoshop cover it, and I wouldn't be surprised to find plugins for free software such as the Gimp as well.
I'm intrigued at trying a shot with a formation -- perhaps I'll give it a try this weekend.

As a follow-up note, there's a photographic technique where you do the opposite of focus stacking! By purposely blurring an image to reduce its apparent depth of field, you can make a normal picture look like a diorama. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_faking.

[ReducedAirFact]

[Back when the forums had a bit of "trouble" in the autumn, the original tail of this thread got lost....here's a repost.]

To address the question of how this might work for a group of planes, here's a messy dogfight I set up, covering a wide range of focal zones.

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If I focus on the near planes (the Italian Hanroit H.D.1's), they're nicely focused, but the Austrian planes are fuzzy:

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If I focus on the far planes (the Austrian Phönix's), they're well-focused, but the Italian planes are fuzzy:

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Enter focus stacking! Here I took about seven shots, with the focus moving incrementally from near to far. Then I had the computer blend them together so the entire shot is in-focus. The pictures on the side are close-ups of those same planes in the larger shot:

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Wow, all those flight stands make things messy. I'll do a quick hack with Photoshop and remove them, plus a little atmosphere for depth.


(Photos with Canon D60, 50mm Macro lens, and Helicon Focus used for the stacked shot. The miniatures are 1/285 scale.)

[Flying Officer Kyte]

Thanks for the update of a very useful thread Daryl.
Rob.

[fast.git]

(Photos with Canon D60, 50mm Macro lens, and Helicon Focus used for the stacked shot. The miniatures are 1/285 scale.)

That's damn cool... I'm going to need to check out Helicon Focus, or some analog!

[grumpybear]

I will have to show this to my camera buddy , he takes my pictures as don't have a camera that can do the job. Thanks for the posting it