Focus stacking or focus bracketing?
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- Опубликовано: 25 мар 2023
- For this week's video, I explain the difference between focus stacking and focus bracketing . Let me know in the comments which on you use and why. Look forward to discussing this with you this week.
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Focus bracketing is the process of taking images at different focal distances. Focus stacking is the putting together of those images whether it be in camera (e.g., Olympus) or via external computer software (e.g., Photoshop, Helicon focus). Focus stacking does not occur without previous focus bracketing. The two are linked. Olympus cameras (and likely some others) have the option to take the images (focus bracketing) and then assemble them in camera (focus stacking). Alternatively, the bracketed images can be kept separate and assembled later out of camera.
This is how I understand the difference between the two also.
100 % right
I work with raw only and a warning to the newbies: the post processing will demand some serious computational power. Yesterday I stacked 81 exposures of 45mp which resulted in a 55 GB working file.
Very true!
Thank you for making it easy to understand the difference between the two.
😄😃😃😃😃😃😃😃
Any time!
Une explication très clare ,merci
Merci!
Thank you! This info helps. You inspire me to get out there and practice!
Have fun :)
Thanks so much, you explain these perfectly! 📷 Practice practice and more practice! Always 😊 happy shooting!
Thank you :)
Now I understand the difference! Thank you Emilie
Glad it is helpful
Thank you for the fstop demonstration, that helped me to understand it!
Glad it was useful!
Many thanks Emilie, you really have been a terrific help. I have just got to practice and practice! Have a lovely evening.
Thank you for your kind words.
Nicely explained. Thank you! Much easier than using a focus rail and doing things manually!
Thank you. Yes way easier :)
Thank you so much for sharing, you really really helped me understand between focus stacking & bracketing. Now, I need to do some practice as you said. Have a lovely day.
Thank you! Have a great day too!
This is kinda just personal note so feel free to ignore - macro photography focus stacking - can just blur background with 1 click in post,,, f2.8 you are getting more light into the sensor but limits the focal range,,, which allows you more room with other things such as faster shutter speed/lower iso and mainly getting closer to the subject,,, with macro photography its mainly about the dynamic convergence of the actual insect/cube (how large the front is vs back, like dynamic car photos) (something you loose with telephoto/zoom lens.) requires you to be extremely close (little natural light) to a subject when using wide angle macro lens,,, focus stacking will mess up shots with moving parts though such as flower moving in wind, or insect moving,,,, hence why #1 most important thing is light/stability,,, if you can use a high CRI light,,, you can decrease aperture, shutter speed, get closer to subject (more convergence), lower iso. And with lower aperture, you increase focal range = less focus stacking/bracketing steps,, = faster shot/cleaner shot if subject moving/unstable,,, (if subject is still then this doesn't matter so much can just use tripod,, and take minimal size aperture, and bump up shutter time... or if system firmware is static timing then that's the limiting factor which would be annoying)
Thank you Emilie, this is very helpfull to explain the differences ! All the best 💫Cheers from France ;)
Thank you! Merci!
Very helpful thanks
Glad it helped
Love the video both systems are used in the Om Camera and why I purchased the camera omlll and the om1
I agree. Focus stacking and live composite were two of the computational mode that pushed me to OM.
What about when to use exposure compensation and exposure bracketing? And when high resolution mode can help with noise reduction?
Nice video clip Emilie 👌😊. Focus stacking / bracketing is not that straight forward especially when shooting out in the field 🤨. I find the focus stacking is extremely useful to give you a good idea of exposure at the time of taking the photos. There are lots of issues to consider and then there is which type of lighting to use - natural , flash or LED. I could discus this process for hours but the most important point is to have fun and enjoy the “shutter therapy” 🥰🥰
Thank for your laid back explanation in English, which obviously is not you're first language among others I dare say.
Thank you for this well explained difference between the two different ways of the two different ways of focus stacking/bracketing. I only recently discovered focus stacking/bracketing. Most of the time I prefer focus stacking, because it gives immediate feedback. But invariably I end up using lightroom/photoshop to arrive at the final image. What do you do with the used photos? Do you just keep the merged image or do you keep all the images used in the merge?
While you use stacking in macro photography, I have used stacking in landscape photography with success.
I keep all images just in case. But very often just used the jpeg
Nice video. I do it my self quit a lot, but many times I get a blurry line around my subject. It's from the focus change from the lens. Do you know how you can prevent this from happening? Or how to get rid of afterwards. 😕 Thanks!
Try playing with different setting like changing your aperture and see what you can get.
Hi I must confess I do forget the image cropping but the results are very good.
Besides the need to take more than 15 frames, it may need to use focus bracketing instead of focus stacking simply because the lens in use is incompatible with the latter technology.
Olympus/OMDS has an online listing showing which lenses compatible with focus stacking.
Good point!
Thank you Emilie, v useful. When using focus stacking or bracketing, is there a maximum Shutter speed you can use? I have noticed that I am getting the odd black gaps on my photo card and wondered if the speed maybe too fast ? I’m desperate to capture fast moving butterflies. Thanks again for your help and advice.
Yes with the flash you have to be careful and adjust. Page. 124 of the OM1 manual for example: The flash sync speed for silent modes (P. 132), High Res Shot (P. 156), and focus bracketing (P. 178) is 1/100 s. Setting [K ISO] to a value over ISO 16000 when
using an option that requires the electronic shutter (for example, silent mode or focus bracketing) sets the flash sync speed to 1/50 s. The flash sync speed is also set to 1/50 s during ISO bracketing (P. 176).
Very helpful. Merci beaucoup. The only doubt that I have is about how many photographies should I take in the bracketing process. That it means that the more the photographies I take, the quality of the image would be higher? Je comprends que les plus de photografies faites, le plus de de post-édition nous aurons a faire, nest pas? :)
See the video of Rob Trek on this one. I allways took too many, which resulted in unsharper images. Now I take, depending on the size of my object, sometimes only 3 or 5 pictures. Rob explains this very well in his second video
Hi Emilie, this is I think probably a v silly question but is High Res the short cut version of photo stacking? Or, is High Res something you just use when you want everything in focus? Or, is it something you should use for both?
Many thanks for all yr videos they are. Great help.
There is no silly question :) High Res mode is very different from stacking. With stacking you get more depth of field with high res you get more resolution. That means 50mega pixels or even 80mega pixels on a tripod versus 20mega pixels.
Under certain conditions, High Res shot can be used as a short cut. Sometimes focus stacking is needed because the camera is too close to the object so there is not enough depth of field (DoF) to cover the whole object under the smallest aperture available. Let's assume the output media (print or screen resolution, etc.) requires 20 MP image and the object should occupy most space of the image. Then I can move the object a bit further away from the camera, which will result in more DoF. Then I shot in the High Res mode, got a 50 MP image from the camera. Then I just crop the image and making the object occupy most space of the output image and the output image may still be about 20 MP. If I do not have a compatible lens and moving the object a bit further away will give enough DoF, then High Res mode is the lazy way (no post processing is needed except for crop, much more convenient than testing different settings of focus bracketing options and different algorithms and options post processing applications offer).
Hi Emilie, when focus stacking with the Olympus FL 700 WR flash and OM1, what speed should you set the flash sync to?
1/100 sec for the om-1 and flash for focus stacking.
It's a shame that there aren't more lenses that support focus stacking in these cameras. Even the 20mm 1.4 Pro doesn't support stacking, which is a real shame, since the close focus is quite good with this lens. I actually only have two lenses that do support it, my 60mm macro and my 12-100. Fortunately, focus bracketing is more widely supported.
Very informative. Thank you! My question though is with a manual focus only lense and using focus bracketing, can the camera adjust the focus point when there is no auto focus? I have the Sony a7RV and Laowa 90 Macro 2x. Very new to Macro, but that does confuse me.
Thank you. I am not familiar with Sony and this lens so I can't answer that. Do you have this function on your Sony?
I do not have a Sony a7RV but I guess all cameras cannot do focus bracketing automatically with manual lens since there is no way to control the focus automatically. You have to do focus bracketing manually with manual lens.
I struggle with technical processing, and I don't know if my Sony a6500 has focus stacking available.
emilie, what olympus cameras are best at focus stacking and bracketing?
i have a gh4 and looking to upgrade
OM1, OM5, Em1 mark III, Em1X...All great camera for focus stacking. Some older so you can get better deals too.
The Em1 mk2 is a fantastic bargain right now
As an ambassador for the brand, maybe you can suggest improvements to OM Systems. I would really appreciate an option menu item that would allow using in camera stacking without keeping the raw files. That way you could experiment changing your composition, interval choices or number in the stack without accumulating a lot of disposable files. Then, turn it on to keep them when those choices are settled.
I am not sure I am understanding. There is the option to select and delete all off them in camera if needed. Although I don't recommend that. Just decide which one to keep when you import and then reformat your card. Easier. With the SD card being affordable space should not be an issue.
Hey Michael, this isn’t quite what you requested, but there is an interesting trick I saw on a Richard Cook video which I wasn’t aware of. When reviewing your shots on the camera, if you zoom out so you can see thumbnails of the shots, you can hold the record button down and scroll through the photos with the dial to select a number of photos easily. From there you can then just hit the delete button.
@@EmilieT as you say in the video, there's no recipe to cover how to successfully use in camera stacking and so experimenting with different intervals such as 3,5,7 or stacks of 5 vs 10 vs 15 images is needed. But when doing this, I don't want to accumulate all the raw images. I just want to see and compare the results of changing these parameters.
Once I've decided the best settings, I will want to keep all the raw files. I just don't want them for the experimental images and I don't want to wade through deleting them in post as I already know I don't want to keep them. Hopefully that's clearer.🙂
@@Nitschke-CAN , thanks and yes I know about this. It's what I do now but when you're in the field, it's hard on the small camera's screen to tell the raw from the jpegs. And as I said, I sometimes just don't want the raws anyway.
Could you opt to shoot only in jpeg? Or does the stacking function override that?
Merci Émilie. Quand une vidéo en français ?
J'espère avoir un peu plus de temps en mai pour pouvoir faire des videos en anglais et en français.
Bonjour Emilie et grand merci pour tes vidéos. Peux-tu me confirmer en français :
1) focus bracketing, on fait la mise au point au début (le plus proche de l'appareil) du sujet
2) Hyper Focus (focus stacking), on fait la mise au point au milieu du sujet.
Je l'avais lu ou vu quelque part, impossible de retrouver.
Traduit avec google
Hello Emilie and big thank you for your videos. Can you confirm me in French:
1) Focus Bracketing, we develop at the start (closest to the device) of the subject
2) Hyper Focus (Focus Stacking), we develop in the middle of the subject.
I had read it or seen somewhere, impossible to find.
Bonjour Eric. Pour le focus stacking, moi je fais la mise au point comme pour le bracketing car je préfère perdre quelques photos. L'appareil prends juste quelques photos devant ton point focus et le reste est sur et derrière le point focus.
Merci Emilie pour cette réponse rapide. Profites bien de cette belle nature👍
I didn't hear a definition of focus bracketing, or how to manually do it.
Will this work with manual focus lenses?
It works but you need to change the focus distance manually and use post processing applications to combine them together. Just like if the cameras do not support HDR and exposure bracketing, you can still do exposure bracketing manually and combine them into one HDR image with post processing applications.
So when I first came upon this video, I watched it and was like "huh??" I did a little digging and apparantly Olympus is the only one that does this and it's due to the limitations of the camera. As stated in an earlier comment, FOCUS BRACKETING is the process of taking short focal distance photos at different focus points where you start of the front of your subject and work to the back. In EVERY OTHER CAMERA other except Olympus, a focus bracket ranges from 2 to 999 photos. Then, you can turn those photos into a composition using software with a process called FOCUS STACKING. Olympus cameras can only handle 15 photos max in a stack, which is why they call it that. My Canon can focus stack all 999 bracketed photos into a stack, it is not limited to 15 like Olympus. So while your explanation may be correct for Olympus cameras, it is completely incorrect for all others. The bottom line, focus bracketing is taking the photos, focus stacking is compositioning the photos. The number of photos don't have anything to do with the price of tea in China, except on Olympus cameras.
You are confusing bracketing and stacking. Like your camera my camera can bracket up to 999 photos but my camera unlike your camera can also take 15 bracketed images and stacked them in camera to give me one photo already stacked. This is specific to OM SYSTEM and a huge advantage. I invite you to go to OM System learning page to continue discovering the amazing functions of the OM cameras in terms of macro photography.
Worst explanation I ever saw.
@@EmilieT Canon R series will bracket AND stack 999 images in camera giving a completed JPG image as the output. Only Olympus calls it what they call it with a 15 photo max. To the rest of the world the bracket is taking the photos, stacking is compositioning the bracketed photos regardless of the number of photos. You Olympus people are strange.
Your camera manual says you have to be on a tripod for this to work. I don't use a tripod for bugs. I can do focus stacking handheld with my OM SYSTEM cameras and get a sharp stacked image in camera which is a tremendous plus when you are a macro photographer. There is a reason why professional photographers are switching to OM SYSTEM for their macro work and it is not because we are strange lol!@@sailingsvsalacia8398
en français , ce serait bien, je ne parle pas l'anglai et ai aucune intention de l'apprendre, alors ce sujet m'interesse donc en français SVP...
Isn't this a little misleading? For 80% of people what you call focus stacking is the process they do after focus bracketing since most cameras don't do focus stacking in camera.
It is not. Those are two different things. OM SYSTEM cameras are really ahead in terms of computational technologies. What they offered really helps me and a lot of other macro photographers in the field.
@@EmilieT that's fine. I shoot Panasonic which doesn't have focus stacking. So to me and everyone else without stacking in camera, focus stacking is the post processing you do after focus bracketing.
If this video is OM specific than that's fine, I didn't know what when I watched it.
@@imaflymydroneatit i understand now. Yes the focus stacking and bracketing is OM specific. I believe other brands have different names as well with some restrictions on what OM called focus stacking in camera.