Infinite DOF.... well at least combined....

[MarineTeng]

Here's my first attempt at a combined DOF picture, it's a combination of 5 different pictures, probably should use a few more for certain areas, i had to do a lot manually since the program i used isn't perfect, you can see my mistakes too

 

[MarineTeng]

Here's two more combined pictures each using about 5 pictures to get the larger DOF

 

[kendog261]

looks good to me nice job

 

[Jan]

very cool pictures....

What does "DOF" mean?

 

[Blazer88]

DOF=depth of field. Taking macro pics generally gives a very shallow depth of field, you can stack multiple pictures with different focus points to gain DOF.

 

[dragoneggs]

I have never tried this. What postprocessing steps do you use to accomplish this? I assume layers in photoshop and doing some kind of masking?

 

[Blazer88]

Here is a quick little tutorial about focus stacking:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/macroviewers/discuss/163367/

You use a free program called CombineZ to stack the individual images and the program will automatically select the focus points. I have tried this with tank shots and personally didn't find it very useful. I just try and select a small enough aperture to get enough DOF while trying to avoid diffraction. Plus I don't want to spend the time processing the RAW into a jpeg and then loading them into the program to export into CS3 for final processing. But maybe I'm just lazy, lol.

 

[dragoneggs]

Here is a quick little tutorial about focus stacking:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/macroviewers/discuss/163367/

You use a free program called CombineZ to stack the individual images and the program will automatically select the focus points. I have tried this with tank shots and personally didn't find it very useful. I just try and select a small enough aperture to get enough DOF while trying to avoid diffraction. Plus I don't want to spend the time processing the RAW into a jpeg and then loading them into the program to export into CS3 for final processing. But maybe I'm just lazy, lol.

I here that! I do much the same. Hi DOF and very slow shutters and low ISO. For fun though I will probably give this a try... once :razz:

 

[Snowboarda42]

You should look into PhotoMatix (PM me about it) and produce pictures called HDR (High Dynamic Range)


Here's an example

 

[MarineTeng]

k, snowboarda i'll send you a pm in a bit, you do mean PhotoMatix, not photoMatrix, just wanted to check, ya i used combineZM and it does take a lot of time, i tried 16 raw images, took like 20 mins and didn't turn out well, so i don't think it's just you Blazer getting Lazy, i'm not sure how much i'll keep using it but it's fun to play around with a bit, one of the main problems i've been running into is that non tripod shots are really hard to stack since i shake and the if the photos don't match well enough they make double images or more and background changes and such as for editing i don't have any of the high end products and have just been using Nikon Editor which came with my camera, has enough of the basic features and raw capabilities

here's a question from me, how do layers in photoshop work, i have access to it 7.0 a couple times a week on a slow computer so i don't mess around with it too much, are layers the same as combining DOF? I might try and get CS3 soon