The Digital Photography Book

Focus Stacking for Sharper Focus

This technique keeps more of our image in sharp focus, and we mostly use this in two genres of photography: macro and landscape. We’ll start with macro, since it’s probably more necessary here because the depth of field (the area of your image that will be in sharp focus) is so shallow on macro lenses that if you’re shooting a flower, the front petal of the flower can be in focus and the back can be totally out of focus (as seen in the image above). Artistically, that can sometimes look cool, but when you do want a lot more in focus, we use focus stacking, which is when we shoot four (or five) shots, focusing on ...