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Simon Stafford helps our Nikon Owner Magazine’s subscribers with all their technical questions.

Question

Dear Simon,

I have been experimenting with the focus shift (stacking) feature of my D850 and have several focus stack sequences I now wish to process.

Can this been done in Lightroom, or Photoshop CC, and if so, how?

Many thanks in anticipation of any advice you can offer.

Kind regards,

E.

Answer

Dear Emma,

Adobe Lightroom does not support focus stacking; however, it can be used to merge a sequence of images to render either a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image, or a panoramic image.

To render a composite focus stack image from the focus stack sequences you have produced with your D850 it will be necessary to use some of the layers tools in Adobe Photoshop CC; here is a summary of the steps you will need to follow:

– Open Photoshop and from the Menu Bar go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack.

– In the Load Layers dialog box, make sure ‘Use’ is set to ‘Files’, then click ‘Browse’. Next, navigate to the folder that contains the images to be complied into the focus stack, select all these image files and, then click ‘Open’.

– In the Load Layers dialog box, below the Layers panel, select ‘Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images’ and, then click ‘OK’.

– In the Layers panel, click on the top file (layer), then hold down the Shift key and click on the bottom file (layer) in the list to select all files (layers).

– Now return to the Menu Bar and go to Edit > Auto-Blend Layers; Photoshop will now merge the layers in the stack to render the composite image.

– Finally, you may need to crop this slightly using the Crop Tool to tidy up the edges of the final image.

Kind regards,

Simon

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