How I focus stack macro images: Macro flower and water droplet
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- Опубліковано 12 лип 2024
- I show how I focus stack a macro image of a flower and water droplet, including the macro lens and lighting used and the editing process of stacking the images in Photoshop and Helicon Focus.
This is a great example for macro photography at home, as you can give it try with basic equipment anywhere in your house.
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#Macro #Photography #Tutorial
Great video on the complete process! Thanks for putting all that work into it!
When I first started my Macro Photography, like you, I missed many, many images, especially "water droplet" style work (which frustrated me greatly). EUREKA! I finally solved the problem and have reduced the "missed" opportunities by more than half. It was such a simple solution I still kick myself for not thinking of it sooner. What? Oh, you too, want to know. Well, I simply added another "RF wireless remote" transceiver to my set-up. By taking my hand off of the camera I had no worries (subconscious or otherwise), about accidentally moving the camera. Backing off from the camera allowed me more time to add "Karo Syrup," relax and concentrate on getting the shot using the remote in my free hand! Oh, and here's another. Just as you see the "drip" touch the very edge, start shooting in rapid succession. Give this easy and simple solution a try and let me know if it worked for you. Awesome video! See ya!!
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~Alexa
Another excellent video, Andy. The amount of work you put into these is astounding, keep it up!
Thanks John!
I really like how you took us through the WHOLE process from shooting to processing and then switching gears from PS to Helicon for the stacking! I really enjoyed your work flow and that you got drawn in to making a "nice" flower look pristine! 👏🏼💪🏼📸
Thanks so much, Chris! I think it's important to see all the steps so it's easy for people to learn what's involved in producing these kinds of images.
This has been the most interesting video I've seen in a while. I learned a few extra things I did not know, so thank you! Helicon is definitely the way to go for stacking!
I love your voice. As an American, I could listen to accents all day!
Haha thanks so much!
This was super helpful! Thank you! Amazing and beautiful job! :)))
It's a buttercup and goes under many names and varieties. An excellent video and very helpful. Just a note about taking multiple shots of a single flower in a situation like this: They never stop moving. That's all of it, not just the head.
This applies to most flowers: Petals and stems are most active with the arrival and departure of sunlight. Some seem to be almost coincidental with the arrival and departure of sunlight. Your studio lights may or may not influence this (depends on the flower).
If you clamp the stem, then try to keep the section above the stem as short as possible i.e. just out of shot. Avoid early morning and evening, when the petals are likely to be most active. This is a generalisation. They all differ slightly.
Which is to say: Get all your shots in a short a time as possible. Don't go off for a coffee halfway through.
I've done many stop-motion sessions of flowers opening and closing. I've had them move completely out of frame during the session. If the flower is common and plentiful, then I will take one and note how much it moves during a planned session. This saves tying all my camera kit up when I could be shooting something else. It takes more planning but also removes a lot of the hit-and-miss element.
Hi Philip, that's such great insight! I've never done stop motion timelapse photography with macro (although I'm keen to try) so it's never really occured to me about how the flower itself moves between images. When I usually do these stacks the shots are all taken within about 20 seconds so it's probably not much of an issue.
Small wildflowers especially droop very soon after being picked. And they can move very quickly. With some it's possible to insert a needle inside the stem before clamping them in place to stiffen their "spine" as it were. Drooping and the weight of glycerin were pulling this flower down and to the right, hence the noticeable artifacts on the petals to the top left.
Just Amazing. Big Thank You, Very Helpful And Informative. Beautiful Photo.
Love it, thanks.
mmhmm.. Good Beans! :))))))))))
Thank you Andrew for sharing BTS and your workflow! Super helpful!
Thanks for a very helpful video with some great tips, both for taking the photograph and the editing. I wondered about burst mode to help catch the drop of glycerin but I guess that wouldn't work with flash.
Great lesson! Thank you!
thanks for this post. I own Helicon Focus (Lifetime purchase) but I have only played around with it, but your post taught me a lot even though doing the focus stack is pretty easy.
Thanks for watching, Greg!
thanks for the focus stacking tips. I will try this on my next macro photography . i do some macro photography as well on my channel.
I saw alot of videos but this was the one I was searching for. I loved it. Thankyou very much and I am so happy that I found your videos.
Praying for your happiness and long and blessed life now😇. Waiting for your insect macro with all the edits.
Thank you so much for your kind comment!
Very helpful. Especially for a Photoshop novice!
Another great video. Pleasure to watch.
Thanks so much, John, that's really kind to say
I like Helicon Focus as it creates great images. 😃
Great video. Really appreciate how you take the audience from start to finish and the discussion of your thought processes for the flower. Can't wait to try the focus stacking on my flower shots. Thank you!
Thanks for watching, Melissa, I really appreciate it!
Great video cheers, thanks for taking the time to fill in the background and well done for your ethical stance on focus stacking techniques. Step over ants...
Fabulous Andrew. Thank you very much. Smashed the subscribe button right away.
Thanks so much, Mark, pleasure to have you on board!
Fantastic beard, fantastic photos!
Thanks!
Excellent, thank you.
There are also "in camera" focus shifting techniques that I find are faster to get a stack with, than manual focusing. Great video, thanks.
Yeah, and this in camera shifting is more accurate. Actually for a macro photo it is a misfortune to constantly touch the camera. Better way is to use remote control and in body focus shifting :-)
Apparently Sony cameras don't have that built-in capability
Spot on bud 👍
Thanks!!
absolutely pin sharp video.
Thank you for the video! I look forward to trying this soon (light arrives today!). Dude, where did you get that "Owl Yeah!" t-shirt?? I need it!! :P
I have just subscribed. Not very good with pen and paper so hopefully my iPad will get this right apologise for any embarrassing mistakes sometimes it’s good sometimes it’s terrible. This was without a doubt the best tutorial I have found on Photostacking it seems everybody assumes you know what to do with your camera you just need to go check the computer you have took me through every step of the way very very clear instructions to thank you very much glad I found you going to be watching more all the best Andy.
Thanks so much, Andy, and a pleasure to have you on board!
Hi Andrew and thank you for the great tutorial, can you please tell me what brand extension tubes you're using, there are so many with mixed reviews I would like to hear what you use... Meke, Kenko...etc
Great video thanks for sharing 👍
Sometimes when I focus stack, if the background is more complex, the edges of the subject can be so perfectly sharp it almost looks like it was cut and pasted onto the image. Do you have any suggestions to make the finished image look more natural? Really dig your channel, keep up the great content!
Add a gaussian blur to that layer in photoshop
Nice work, when using helicon does the software work better when manually refocusing or using a macro rail?
Hey Richard! I don't actually use a macro rail so can't comment on that but I do find helicon better when there's lots of fine detail to stack, such as on watches or things like that
This is a great video, I will add a shiny background with a transparent paper with the same color and a soft light in the back illuminating indirectly.
Digicam control is free and will control the focus in micro steps for you. Try manually focusing 80 or so steps with 1/4 mm steps. Plug the camera into a computer and make your life soooo much easier.
What remote trigger do you use for your flash. I can't get my trigger to fire when my canon 5d mk4 is in live view, works fine when using the view finder
I use a Canon 5d2 with f1.8 50mm STM, macro tubes. My x, y, z table shakes. Looking for something more stable.
Nice video, good explanation..
I do wanna know how you get around this problem I have from time to time.
I Find when I use my nifty-fifty 50mm 1.8, and a extension tube, on certain things I can't get sharp photo's from back to front or vice versa. Maybe my object is to big, or do you ever have same problem?
Thanks for watching, Kent! There could be a few issues so it's difficult to say exactly what the problem is here. It's possible that even with the extension tube you're still too close to the subject to be able to get sharp focus, or it's possible that you're not taking enough focus point images in order to get a fully sharp image once you've done the stacking. Otherwise I'm not sure what the problem would be -- if you're able to focus on every part of your subject and you're taking enough shots then it's perhaps something going wrong in the stacking process. Bigger objects that fill the frame can be more difficult to stack as they change their relative size so much when changing the focus so the stacking software has to effectively resize your images in order to get them to line up and that can make things trickier.
Hi Andrew,
Can it be possible to get a tac sharp photo from side to side, I mean focusing from left to right and vice-versa?
Would you consider using a focus stacking slide so that you don't need to touch the camera focus ring each time?
For studio work like this I would consider it (although I don't have one) but if I was working on location I think I might find a rail system a bit too time consuming.
Insted of an extension tube (you lose AF and "conversation" between the lens and the body) could a 1.7 x TC (teleconverter) work as well ? I have a Nikon 105mm 2.8 VR lens, so i would magnify more, right ?
Your spots on the BG might be sensor dust (especially looking at how OOF your stem is, your BG is considerably further away), with your f/14 (as I recall) and an extension tube, dust/diffraction on the sensor should be considered.
maybe a daft question, do you have the camera higher than the subject and angled down to stack.
There are no daft questions in photography! Okay, may be some, but not this. Angle of the camera/subject doesn't matter, the distance between the subject and its background is what would dictate whether you'd need to focus stack in the first place. If there's a relatively big distance between the foreground subject and the background you'll need different focus points to get it all sharp - that's when you'll need to take multiple photos at different focus points to stack together. The same principle is true whether you're looking down at your subject, looking up, looking across etc. Hope that helps!
Hi, i've tried this and i bought glycerol but i can't get that long tail of the drop that you got. Do you keep it in the fridge to make it thicker... :)
hello super your video can vs tell me which product to make the taste cordially
Beginner here. What is the flash system used and why those particular ones? What setting do you use on the camera? Clearly i am deeply ignorant about flash, but if I'm going to shoot macro, it is obvious I need to know about more than available light....
How does moving your focus point work as compared to you turning the focus ring?
I was talking to a friend of mine about this today. He is a medical and science photographer at a university and he was talking about photographing the head of a fruit fly, which is about .25mm across, using focus stacking! I asked if using a focus rail was a better option than using the ring. I asked if the focus breathing would be better or worse than tracking in with a rail. _He told me he uses a rail._
If you use a DOF calculator, you can get a very good idea of the amount you have to wind the rail in for each shot. For me, using a 30 year-old 105mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor, at 450mm shooting distance, it would mean moving the rail by about 3mm for each shot if got focus overlap is to be maintained. I suppose I’m getting a rail next! You also need a damned good tripod, not a lightweight one. I just found an old, heavyweight Manfrotto on the internet. I use the self timer to trigger the shutter and I get really good results.
Hope this helps.
I'm just starting having a go at macro photography and I'm a little stumped... I'm framing my composition and focusing on an area in that photo. As I change focus so my composition/field of view is also changing almost like it's zooming in and out. The camera is on a steady tripod and I've used two different macro lenses but the same effect is still occurring. What's going on? Is this normal with macro lenses when you're focusing so close to your subject? Thanks for any advice!
It’s called “focus breathing”. It’s a symptom of many lenses designed for DSLR/primarily still photography. Lenses which explicitly (by design) are not susceptible to it are almost always video-centric designed lenses, if not outright cinema lenses.
Put your camera on manual focusing so the camera cannot change the focusing.
Maybe seam like a strange question but if photoshop had managed to merge the stacked images how would you incorporate the image with the droplet into the merged image
If it had managed to stack the images then it would have generated a single merged layer. I'd then be able to open the droplet as a new layer above it, adjust it's position and then using a layer mask, simply erase the areas around the droplet. Hope that helps and thanks for watching!
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography thanks I'll give that a go
do you think it is better to go from the back forward ?
SUPER your video what is the product to make the taste cordially
Why don’t you put your camera on burst mode to catch the drip at the right moment?
Have a goodnight
We will cotinue on macro on tuesday
Just looked on amazon for extension tubes and a lot of the reviews are saying they cause damage to your camera. Have you had any such ussues
Hi Steve, thanks for watching! In all honesty I cant even begin to think HOW they could cause damage as it's just a tube between the camera and lens, it doesn't interfere with the camera in any way. Certainly in my experience of having used them on a variety of cameras for some time, nope I've never had any issues with damage! Hope that helps
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography this is what one reviewer is saying.
I purchased these extension tube for with with my Canon 5D camera.
After using the extension tubes a few times (less than 1 week) the camera died. An electrical short generated in the extension tube appears to have fried the cameras main board, and the camera is a write off.
That's weird to hear. The tubes are passive and don't have any electrical supply in them themselves so aren't able to 'generate' anything. I don't want to say 100% that it won't happen (I'd feel awful if it did happen to you!) but it's never happened to me or anyone I know who regularly uses them, nor would I hesitate to use them every day on my best cameras.
Sounds incredible to me. The camera failure is more likely attributable to some other cause than to the extension tubes, given the millions of tubes in use daily without problems.
That said, I can imagine the remote possibility that not locking the tubes fully in place **might** misalign the contacts in the tubes in a way that **might** cause a problem. As well, it's probably advisable to turn off the camera when installing and removing extension tubes (probably equally advisable when doing the same with lenses).
2:43
Affinity photo is much cheaper than Helicon focus and Photoshop. It's much easier to stack than PS and easier to clone out blurry parts.
u are showing action photo IE burst mode
lol bog standard lights about 700 quids worth lol , just joking love your videos
You reduce f no of your lense.
You didn’t use photoshop focus stacking correctly.
Most of us have photoshop to use , but I really don't see the point of you using an additional software to fix the problem you've faced when you tried the stacking process . I was hoping and expecting you to fix it with photoshop , in reality you have defeated the whole purpose of your tutorial . I thought that , the most important part of your tutorial was Focus stack Macro photography but unfortunately it was more of how to focus and editing not much of stacking . I really wanted to like your tutorial .
It's a tutorial on focus stacking and I'm showing how I use a piece of affordable software specifically designed for focus stacking. It's about using the right tools for the job.
@@AndrewLanxonPhotography my main concern and question , why have you not fixed the problem you faced with photoshop , that would have been a great tutorial :)
As I say in the video, a focus stack of that many layers to manually 'fix' in photoshop would take hours and hours of work and would likely be beyond my (and most people's) technical ability. I use these tools professionally where I don't have the luxury of spending 20+ hours on a single image -- I need to get the best result in the most efficient way possible, and it's exactly those tips and tricks I'm passing on here. Remember that this video is titled 'How I focus stack macro images' not 'How you can focus stack macro images in Photoshop'.
i hate the phrase "pin sharp"