RAZOR SHARP Landscape Photos: Focus Stacking in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop

1. Introduction: Have you ever struggled to take landscape photos that are perfectly sharp and in focus from the foreground all the way to the background. We all know that even photos taken with the best composition and lighting can be ruined if they lack sharpness throughout the entire frame. Hi, my name is Meredith, and I am a landscape photographer and outdoor educator based in Denver, Colorado. In this course, I'll be teaching you a technique called focus stacking, which will allow you to create the sharpest landscape photos that you ever imagined possible. This is a comprehensive master class that covers everything you need to know about focus stacking in a thorough step by step fashion. From the very basics like what focus stacking is and how it works to more advanced focus stacking techniques that incorporate exposure blending and more. We will be using Adobe Light Room and Photoshop to edit and create our focus act images. The techniques that you learn in this course will allow you to create professional quality photographs with any DSLR or mirrorless camera that you own. You don't need extremely expensive professional grade equipment. By the end of this course, you'll be able to create unbelievably sharp landscape photographs that you will be proud to share, print, or even sell. If you are ready to join me in learning how to master focus stacking, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson. 2. Focus stacking basics: Welcome to the class. All it is so wonderful to have you here. In this first lesson, we're going to cover some of the basics of focus stacking. Including what it is, how it works, and when you're going to want to use this technique. Let's start with what focus stacking is. Focus stacking is a technique that is used to increase the depth of field in a photograph. You can use it when you want to get an entire scene extremely sharp from the foreground all the way to the background. This technique involves taking multiple exposures, usually something around two to five exposures of the same composition at different focus points. Then you combine each of these photos in post processing using Light Room and Photoshop or any other photo editing software that you might prefer. In this class, we're going to be using Lightroom and Photoshop to create our focus stacks. Focus stacking can be broken down into three main parts. The first part is when we take the photographs. In this first part, we take multiple images at different focus points in the scene. Usually this will include one image focused on the foreground, one on the midground, and one on the background. What you can see here in this diagram is a photo that I focused using three separate exposures. This scene was virtually impossible to get really sharp with a single exposure when I was in the field. I intended to create a focus stack by creating three separate images. For the first photo, I focused in the very close foreground. You can see the box right here indicates where I focused in the first photo. For the second photo, I focused closer to the midground enough to capture the depth of field, as you can see in this part of the diagram indicates how much depth of field was covered in the second image. For the third photo I focused in the background. You can see everything from about here all the way to infinity was in focus. For this particular example, I needed to take three exposures to capture that entire depth of field. The number of exposures that you'll need to take will mostly depend on the F stop that you use. How small or large your aperture is, and the focal length of your lens. If you were to use a wide angle lens with a short focal length accompanied with a small aperture, you would have a much larger depth of field per exposure. And you'd be able to get away with fewer exposures to combine into your focus stack. In contrast, if you were to use a telephoto lens or a lens with a longer focal length, with a wider aperture, you'd have a much shallower depth of field for each image. In that case, you would have to take many more exposures, focusing at smaller increments throughout the scene to cover the entire depth of field. Once you have enough images to cover the entire depth of field of a scene, the next step is post processing. That's when you go home, upload your images into light room and edit the exposures that you want to focus stack. There's a few ways that you can make edits to your exposures that you'll learn in this course. One of them is to use the light room develop module, which you're probably familiar with. The other is to use Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. The third step in the focus stacking technique is to combine the images that you just process using Adobe Photoshop. You can combine all of your exposures to a single final sharp image. Now that you know the basics of what focus stacking is and how it works, why would you even want to use this technique? Why wouldn't you just want to use a small aperture and focus at the hyper focal distance to get a very large depth of field and get everything in the scene sharp. And by the way, for those of you who are unfamiliar with what the hyper focal distance is, it's really just the point in the scene that you want to focus on. The exact point that will maximize the depth of field for a given lens and a given set of settings. Won't go into too much detail here about what the hyperfocal distance is and how to use it, But it's a very important topic in landscape photography and I will provide you some resources where you can go and learn and read about all about what the hyperfocal distance is. Our question, why would you want to focus ac if you are using a small aperture and focusing at the hyperfocal distance? Well, sometimes it's technically impossible to get everything in focus from the foreground all the way to the background in a single photo, Even when you are maximizing depth of field using a wide angle lens and your smallest aperture, and focusing at the hyperfocal distance. For example, if you look at this scene, the rock that you see in the foreground is so close to the lens that it was impossible, like I said, to get this entire scene sharp from the foreground to the background in a single exposure. Even if I did focus at the hyperfocal distance and use the smallest aperture on this lens, which was 22, the distance between the foreground and the background is just too large. In addition, the foreground is just too close to my camera. You remember, the closer your subject is to the camera, the shallower the depth of field will become. Another thing that's really important for you to understand here is that even if I could have achieved the depth of field I wanted to in this scene with a single exposure, I would have had to have used a sub optimal aperture like 22. In other words, even if I had used 22 and was able to get this entire scene sharp, it still wouldn't have been ideal because the smaller your aperture, the more you introduce something called diffraction. Usually you want to avoid using smaller apertures because of this optical phenomenon called diffraction. When you use very small apertures like 22 or smaller, light passing through the aperture can diffract or scatter, causing a loss of sharpness. This can result in softer, less detailed images. Smaller apertures might not always be the best choice when you're trying to make the sharpest photos possible. One of the main benefits to using focus stacking is that you can get the same depth of field, but use more ideal apertures on your lens, like 5.6 or eight, which are usually the sharpest apertures on most lenses. When you focus stack using the sharpest apertures, you'll set yourself up to capture the sharpest images possible with your equipment. All right, let's summarize what you've learned so far. The reason you would want to focus stack is when you want to overcome the limited depth of field of a lens and maximize image sharpness from the foreground all the way to the background of a composition. You will typically only want to focus stack when you can't achieve full depth of field and sharpness throughout an image. Even when you're using optimal depth of field, camera settings and focusing at the hyper focal distance. This usually occurs when the foreground of your composition is extremely close to your camera lens. The background of your composition is very far away. Focus stacking will allow you to take multiple exposures at different focus points using your lens sharpest aperture. Then you can use Photoshop to combine the sharpest areas of each exposure into a single extremely sharp final photograph. 3. Best settings, equipment, and tips : In this lesson, we're going to cover some of the best settings and equipment that you should use when you're focus stacking, As well as some tips that I think will help you out. Let's start with some of the settings I definitely think are best when you're focus stacking. First, let's talk about aperture. I almost always use apertures of eight or 11 for all of the images that I used to focus stack, because eight is the sharpest aperture of most of my lenses. If you don't know what the sharpest aperture of your lenses are, they're usually in the middle range of your lens apertures. As a general rule, they are about two to three stops closed maximum aperture of a lens, which for many lenses is about 5.6 or eight. For example, if the widest aperture of your lens is 2.8 the sharpest aperture, a few stops closed from 2.8 is 5.6 or eight. I'd also recommend that you test your lenses to find the sharpest aperture, rather than just guessing. You can do this by taking a series of photos at different apertures while keeping all of the other settings constant. Iso shutter speed, the focus point. Keep all of those things constant, then just change the aperture. When you're taking a series of images, typically you'll want to take photos at each full stop. For example, 2.845 0.6 and so on. And then you upload the images to your computer and zoom in to assess which are the sharpest. The aperture, where the image is the sharpest is often considered the lenses sweet spot. That's the one that you'll want to use when you're shooting images to focus stack if you want to have the sharpest final images possible. The next setting that I'd recommend for focus stacking is to set your camera to aperture priority mode. If you're unfamiliar with aperture priority mode. It's just a semi automatic shooting mode on your camera where you can set your desired aperture and the camera will automatically adjust the shutter speed to achieve the correct exposure. In landscape photography, using aperture priority mode is beneficial because it allows you to control the depth of field manually by setting the F stop, but then it does the rest of the work finding the correct shutter speed. This is especially important for focus stacking because you want the aperture to be the same for each exposure that you take. You don't necessarily need to worry about the shutter speed unless something in your scene is moving. If you're in a situation where something in the scene is moving, like you have moving water or say a tree branch is blowing in, the wind or flowers are blowing around, then what you could do is boost your ISO, increase your ISO, or manually change to a smaller aperture so that you can increase the shutter speed and freeze any motion. The next setting that I'd recommend is that you use the focusing mode called Single Point Spot focus. This allows you to focus on just a single point in your composition. And it gives you complete control over where you're focusing for each exposure. Because you want to have control where in your composition you're focusing. For example, when you focus in the foreground point, the midground point, or the background point, you want to use the focusing mode where you can focus specifically on each point rather than letting the camera guess for you, which a lot of other focusing modes do. This setting really applies to all landscape photography, not just when you're focus stacking. If you are a landscape photographer, I just always recommend having your focus mode set to single point spot focus. Finally, the last recommendation that I have here with regard to camera settings, focus stacking is to choose your focus points manually. A lot of cameras these days, especially more advanced professional grade cameras, have automatic focus stacking features. They're often called focus bracketing or focus shifting. If you look for those on your camera, what this auto focus stacking feature will do is essentially take a predetermined set of exposures. You could tell it to take 345, however many exposures that you want at specific focus points, which are usually at increments that you give the camera as well. I personally never use this feature because I prefer to have complete control over where I focus in. I often find it to be cumbersome and overcomplicated and really just get in the way when I'm out in the field creating a focus deck. This automatic focus bracketing feature also makes it a little more complicated to do things like incorporating exposure, blending into a focus deck, as you'll learn how to do later in this course. But just so you know, some photographers do prefer to let the camera auto focus deck for you if your camera has that feature. It's up to you if you want to play around and experiment with that feature on your camera. But in my experience, it's unnecessary. And I find it easier to just manually choose the focus points in the scene that you want to focus on. Next, let's briefly talk about equipment for focus stacking. The only real, essential piece of equipment that you'll need, other than your camera and your lenses, is a tripod. The reason that you always want to use a tripod when you're focus stacking is that it helps minimize any movement between each frame. When you have movement between the frames or the exposures that you take, you will likely see some weird stuff going on. When you go into Photoshop to blend your images together, you actually can create focus stacks without using a tripod. But I promise you that it will save you a lot of time and headaches if you use a tripod to keep your frames or your compositions in perfect alignment from one exposure to the next. Finally, I want to share just a few tips and best practices when you're out in the field. Focus stacking first. Generally, it's a good idea to start focusing from the foreground and work your way towards the background. This will help you keep track of where you focused in each exposure and it will also help you determine if you've covered the entire depth of field in your composition. Another common question is how many exposures you need to take in order to capture the entire depth of field of a scene. The answer to that is that it really depends. We touched on this a little bit in the previous lesson. The number of exposes, the number of focus points that you'll need for a focus stack to get the complete depth of field will really depend on your camera settings, where you focus, your focal length and any special scenarios such as when you want to introduce or reduce motion. Blur. Say if something in your photograph is moving like water or flowers or anything like that. It also depends on how close your foreground is to your lens. Most of the time in virtually all of my focus stacks, I can get away with using just two or three exposures. Finally, the last thing I want to say here is that focus stacking for me and my photography is usually a last resort technique. If I can, I try to get the entire depth of field in a single image because that will always make your life easier when you are post processing your images. If I can avoid focus stacking with settings that don't reduce image sharpness too much, that's typically the route that I usually decide to go. I hope that overview of settings and tips helps you out. Next, we'll take a look at our first focus stacking example. Start to dive into how this whole process works. I look forward to seeing you there in the next lesson. 4. How to open photos in Photoshop method 1 - exporting from Lightroom: In this lesson, I'm going to show you a couple of different ways that you can open the images that you want to focus stack into Photoshop. Now, the first way I'm going to show you how to do this is the simplest method. This is the method that's most commonly used to open a sequence of focus stacked images into Photoshop. If you're a beginner, if you're first learning how to use Photoshop and edit your photos, I definitely recommend using this method first. But after I show you how to do this first method, I'm going to show you my workflow. If you're a little more advanced, you can see how I go from Light Room into Adobe Bridge and open my images that I want to focus stack into Adobe Camera raw first before I open them into Photoshop. And we'll dive into this, you'll see how it all works and it will start to make a lot more sense. Here I am in light room. I've navigated to where the images are that I want to open in Photoshop. Here are two images that I want to blend together. They're taken with the exact same setting. Iso is 64, really the lowest ISO on my camera. The focal length is 14 millimeters. I used an F stop of 11, that's because I wanted to increase the depth of field a little bit over eight. Typically I'd use eight because that's the sharpest aperture on this particular lens. But I can really get away with 11 without noticing any major difference for each of these. Shutter speed was one 15th of a second. If we look at this other one, we have the exact same settings. Now the only difference is that the point at which I focused is different. If we take a look at these images in larger view, if I press the Space button, I can fill the entire frame with this image. We can see by zooming in, we can see which parts of the image are sharp and which are less sharp. We can determine which parts of the image I probably focused on. If we start to scroll up, just by clicking and dragging on this image, you can see that the background looks pretty sharp. The foreground, while it still looks relatively sharp, it is a little bit fuzzy. Let's take a look at the other image. You can see here that the foreground, this rock right here, is much sharper than in the previous image we just looked at. If I scroll up, the background is a lot softer. We can see this a little bit better by using the comparison view in light room. If we compare these images side by side, the one on the right, the background is much sharper than in the one on the left. If we scroll down here, the foreground is a lot softer on the right image than the one right here. Just by looking at these images in light room, I can see that I probably focused about right here or right here, somewhere where I thought the hyper focal distance was. Then for the second image, I focused on the backgrounds. Probably somewhere around right here. Because I was using such a short focal length lens with a relatively small aperture 11. Each of these images got a pretty wide depth of field. I didn't have to take a lot of different exposures to get the entire image in focus. When I eventually get into Photoshop and blend these together to get a completely sharp image, I'm going to go back here to the grid view just so I can see both of these images. The first thing that I want to do here is start developing one of these images. I'm going to select this first image here and then I'm going to go to the develop module in light room. And I'm not going to go into detail, too much detail here about how to use all these sliders. You can learn how to use all of these sliders in a light room or Adobe Camera Raw class. But just to do some simple edits just right off the bat here. Going to start by bringing down the highlights because this will really darken down the sky. You can see the sky looks a lot more natural and not so over exposed because the area down in the foreground here is so dark. I'm going to bring the shadows up. I might bring that down just a little bit, just so it looks pretty natural. I don't want to overdo that increase in shadows. Typically, I play around a little bit with the white. If increasing, maybe Rockies back and forth. See what that does to the image. Maybe boost that just slightly. The blacks maybe increase a bit here. Just to reduce some of that contrast just slightly. What I might do here now is increase the vibrant. Increasing some of the colors that aren't very saturated. That's what vibrant will do, Increase saturation just slightly. I don't want to make this area back in the mountains here look too unnatural. I think I'll just leave it at that for now. What I'll do next is go back to the library module. Where I can see both of the image that I want to focus stack rather than editing the second image just like we did to the first image. If we go to the second image and fill it to fit the screen, we are going to want to adjust this image similarly or exactly like the first image. If we go back in the film strip to the first image, there's pretty significant difference already between the first one and the second one. The first one looks pretty nice after those global adjustments we made. What I can do here is I can select the first image, the image that we've made our adjustments to. Then holding shift, I can click on the second image. Now once you have all of the images that you want to focus selected here, here we just have two. Later on we'll have more than two. You'll see how this works with more images, but for now we will select those two images and then right click. Then on the menu that appears here, you will go to Develop Settings. Then you'll go to the sub menu and click on Sync Settings. In this dialog box that appears, you'll want to check really all of these check boxes. If some of them aren't checked. The easiest way to check them all is to click Check All. A lot of these I haven't touched or adjusted in this example, but typically you want to click Check All so that you transfer any settings that you change here or any adjustments that you change here. And apply them to all of the other exposures in your focus stack, or at least the ones that you want to apply these settings to. When you're finished with this, you can click Synchronize. Now the second exposure should have all of those settings applied to it. We can see the first exposure looks very similar to the second exposure. Now that we've developed these images, we can go ahead and export them out to Photoshop. In order to do that, the next thing you'll do is right click on one of these images. While you have all of your exposures selected that you want to export, I'll right click and then go to Edit. In, in this sub menu, I'll go down to open as Smart Object Layers in Photoshop. You'll see in just a moment why I prefer to open these as smart object layers instead of just layers in Photoshop, especially when you're working with raw files. We'll click on Open as smart object Layers. And we'll let these photos open up in Photoshop. Photoshop should just automatically pop up here. All right, so now we have both images opened in a single window in Photoshop. By selecting, open these as layers in Photoshop, rather than opening each individual layer in its own separate window, here we just have one single window. We have both of our layers in one window. That just will make your life much, much easier. The second thing is we open these as smart objects. You can see that they're smart objects because of this little icon right here. The benefit to opening these as smart objects is that it allows you to open these images into Adobe Camera raw. Make any adjustments to the raw image that you might want to change before you start to blend them together. Let me show you what that means. What I can do here is double click on the image thumbnail because it's a smart object, it will open immediately in Adobe camera raw. This will allow me to make adjustments to the image, such as the highlights and the shadows, the things that we changed in light room when we were in the developed module. We can change those exact same things here. Adobe Camera Raw essentially works the exact same way as the develop module in light room. It runs on the same processing engine. If you know how to use light room to develop your photos, then you know how to use Adobe Camera raw, virtually the exact same way. Let's say after you develop this in light room, you open it up in Photoshop. You think that the exposure or the contrast is a little bit off. You can open the smart object like I showed you, double clicking on the thumbnail. Then maybe increase the exposure just slightly just to get it dial it in exactly how you want it. Then you click okay, and the image will update to reflect the adjustments that you just made. Now you'll notice that the image below, if I hide this layer, the adjustments were not applied to this image. If you want to sync both of these settings, you'll have to go into the second image. If I double click on that thumbnail and pull up Adobe camera raw, I'll have to make some of those same adjustments. That can be a little bit of a pain to do. The nice thing about this is, is that if you want to adjust, say only the foreground or only the background, because we're merging these photos together, we can get the best of both worlds. This doesn't make sense right now. Don't worry. I'm going to show you an example of how this works later in the course. But just for now, understand that we can open these smart objects and make really fine tune these adjustments to each one of the images before we blend them together. When I make these adjustments, I click Okay. This is one of the most basic ways we can open a series of images that we want to focus stack into Photoshop. 5. How to open photos in Photoshop method 2 - exporting to Adobe Bridge + Camera Raw: Now the second method that I'm going to show you involves using Adobe Bridge. I will explain as we work through this, why I use this particular workflow and why I think it works better. Let's go back to light room. I'm going to select our first image here and go back to the developed module. I'm going to reset the settings so that the image is back to its original raw condition. The original raw file. I will do the same thing for the second image. All right, now we have our two original raw files go back to the library. Now the problem I have with using the developed module to edit these photos is that after I edit the photos, there's a chance that I could permanently alter or delete or somehow mess up my original raw files. This is something that I want to avoid at all costs. I always want to have an original copy of the raw file that I never have to worry about getting deleted or developing it in a way that I can't return to the original state. I want to develop these photos outside of light room. The way I'm going to do that is through Adobe Bridge. Adobe Bridge will allow me to edit these files. These are raw files in Adobe Camera Raw. Let's look at how to do this a little bit more about why I go about doing it in this particular way. The first step in opening these photos into Photoshop. Unlike before, I'm not going to touch them in the developed module right away. I'm going to select them both. Right click and then go to export. I'm going to export these photos into a specific directory on my computer. I talk about this really extensively in my photo organization course as well as my comprehensive Photoshop course if you want the details of just the step by step by step workflow of how I set up the organization of my light room, all of these different smart collections here, and how I export them out of light room into bridge. You can get really a deep dive education on how to do that in those classes. I'm just going to do a very brief overview here of how that works. I'm going to export these files into a directory on my computer that is located on my desktop. There's a folder on my desktop that I created with several different folders. Again, I go into this in my courses that I recommend you check out. One of the folders that is relevant here is the exported raw files folder. Once you have this exported raw files folder on your desktop, you can export these files into that folder. If I click these, files will appear in this exported raw files folder. I actually I believe that I've already exported these into this folder. Assume that this is the first time I have exploited these. I would just click okay. Now once I have these files exported, I will open up Adobe Bridge. If you've never used Bridge before, it's basically a way to preview and organize and edit your photos. That sounds a lot like light room, but it's actually a bit different. It's a really useful application that you can use as an intermediate between Lightroom and Photoshop. It allows you to open your photos in Adobe camera Raw really easily and keep track of your images. Once you open Adobe Bridge, you will want to navigate in the folders panel to your exported raw files folder, whatever you name that, whatever folder that you have that you export your focus decking files into your workspace here might look a little bit different if you're opening up bridge for the first time. But again, I walk you through how to set up this workspace in my Photoshop class. If you're new to bridge, that will definitely be a prerequisite class before learning this particular method. All right, if you're still with me, we're going to go to our export raw files folder. This is all of the files that I've exported out of light room that are ready to be edited. Once I'm in this folder, I will navigate to where our photos are. I see them right here. And I'm going to click the first one. Hold down Shift and click the second one. Then I will right click and go to open in Camera Raw. Now that I'm in Camera Raw, I can make the same adjustments that we made when we were in the developed module. In light room, we can do things like reduce the highlights just to bring down the sky. We can increase. Exposure just a bit. Increase the shadows. Maybe a little contrast. Whites just a bit. Bring up the blacks, let's see vibrant. Just to add a little more color, vibrance and saturation. We'll leave it at that for now. Again, like before, the second image has not been edited. We can select the first image. Hold down shift, select the second. Go to these three dots right here, and go to sync settings like we did in light room. We can go to check all and click Okay. Now we have both photos synced with the same settings. In order to open both of these photos, we'll have to have both of them selected. Like we've done before. I will select both of these photos, then go to Open Objects. If this button does not say open objects, because what this will do is open both of these images as smart objects. If it doesn't say open objects, go to this link right here. Make sure this box is checked where it says open in Photoshop as smart object. If you still don't see open objects, click this little arrow here and select Open as Object. From this list here, I already have that selected. I will click Open Objects. Now both of our images have opened up in Photoshop. You can see here that the image is opened up as layers in individual windows. We have a image here, and our second image is here. We need to get both of these images into a single window, so that we have both images as two layers in a single window. In order to get these two images together, I will select one of these windows with one of our layers. I will right click in this menu. Go to Duplicate Layer. In this dialog box will select the document that you want to transfer or duplicate this layer to, because I want to send it to this window. I will select this document and click Okay. Now if I go over to this window, we can see we have both layers, both of the images that we want to focus. You can see if I hide this layer, we see the, I guess this one was sharper in the background. We have both of the layers that we want to stack because I don't need this one anymore. I'll just go ahead and close it without saving. Now this method that I showed you, opening images, exporting them from light room, opening them in Adobe Bridge, and then editing in Adobe Camera raw. What's so great about this is that I never have to worry about messing up one of my raw files. It transfers the process to a completely separate directory on my computer, leaves everything in my Lightroom catalog alone. I never have to worry about making edits, like I mentioned, deleting things and permanently messing up my raw files. With that, we will end this lesson and I will see you in the next one. 6. Simple focus stack using Photoshop auto-blend: Now that I have both of the images that I want to focus deck opened as two smart object layers and a single Photoshop window, I can start to prepare these images to blend together into a super sharp final image. The first thing that I like to do here is rename both of my layers. I like to order them from the sharpest foreground to the sharpest background. It helps to really zoom into the image so you can see which image is which then hide and show the layers. If I hide this layer, you can see that the bottom layer, the rocks in the foreground are a lot softer. I can tell that this is the image that I focused on, the background. If I move up in the image here, you can see that the background is pretty sharp. If I show the top layer, the background gets much softer. If I go down here, we see the foreground is really sharp. That means that the top layer is the foreground. I'll just rename this foreground, that I know that the foreground is where I focused in this image. Then we can rename this background. Like I said, I like to order these layers from foreground to background. If I had focused somewhere in the midground, that layer would be in between these two. But just for this example, we only have two images to focus stack. The next thing that we need to do is convert these layers from smart object layers into pixel layers. Now the downside to this is that we'll lose the ability to jump back and forth into Adobe camera raw to edit these photos like you saw in the previous few lessons. But we need to remove the smart object in order to use Photoshops built in focus stacking features. In order to remove the smart object, all you need to do is select all of these layers by holding down Shift as you have one selected, hold down shift, then you'll right click on one of the layers when they're all selected and go to rasterized layers. Now you can see that the smart object icon is on the bottom right of the thumbnail, has been removed. If I double click on the thumbnail, unlike before, where Adobe Camera raw would open up, now we have this layer style dialog box. We've lost that, like I said, the ability to get back into Adobe Camera. But that's okay, because Photoshop has a really amazing focus stacking feature, which I'll show you here in just a moment. In order to use Photoshops focus stacking capability, we'll need to select both of these layers. Again, hold down Shift and have both of these selected. Then I will go to Edit, then auto align layers. If we didn't rasterize the layers, this option would not be available. This is a really important step because it lines up the images perfectly, one on top of the other. Because what can happen is as you take a sequence of focus stacking exposures, sometimes wind or even just the slightest touch of your camera can throw the images out of alignment. This step will realign the images. You'll just select auto and then, okay, let this load for a second. Now both of these images are perfectly aligned with each other. You can see here, if I hide the top layer, that these layers are in perfect alignment. There's a slight shift, Photoshop will take care of that when we blend these together. In the next step, that shift, you'll see it when you're focus stacking. It's called focus breathing. That just refers to when your lens is focal length changes. When you take different exposures at slightly different focus points, the focal length will change just slightly. That's just, again, because the focusing distances are changing. Usually this is not an issue. We're not going to worry about that for now. All right, we have both of these layers still selected. The next step, we'll go back to Edit, and this time we'll go to Auto Blend layers. It's right under Auto Align Layers. We'll select Auto Blend Layers. Select Stack Images, and click Okay. This is where Photoshop is going to take the sharpest parts of both of these images and combine them into a single final, super sharp image. If you let that load for a second, we can see the final image. The merged image is right here. Now if we scroll and scan through this image, you can see that the foreground is extremely sharp. And the background is extremely sharp. We're seeing the best of both worlds in the foreground and the background image, what you're seeing to the right of the thumbnail is the layer mask. What Photoshop is essentially done is mask out the areas that aren't sharp. We hide this top layer which is the merge, the completely sharp layer. We can see by hiding this top layer that I'll scroll out here a bit. All of the areas of the image that are sharp in this bottom layer have been kept in the image. We've masked out everything that isn't sharp. By the way, if masking is a totally new concept to you, I definitely go back and check out those Photoshop classes that I created. Look at the masking lessons. Masking is really a critical skill that you need to understand in landscape photography, especially if you're using Photoshop. You don't necessarily have to understand masking in order to focus stack because shop does all the work here for you. And I'll show you some more examples later in the course where you will need to understand how masking works in order to blend some images together. But for now, just understand that masking will reveal and hide certain parts of the image. The white areas are revealing what's in this image and the black areas are hiding it. That's why we see only parts of this image shown here. If I turn this layer on and hide, the one below, the sharp areas are the ones that are revealed in white. The less sharp areas are hidden. Now, this image on top is the merged image, and that's the only one that we're going to see, because this is the final result. You can stop here if you want to. This is the basics of how to use Photoshop to blend 123 or more images together. The same process would work if we had as many layers as you wanted in this layer stack. At this point, you can make some final adjustments. I recommend cropping the image, especially if you have some border from the auto align feature. Sometimes when Photoshop will auto align, it'll create a little border around the image that you need to crop out any final adjustments here that you want to make to the image. This would be the time to do that. With that, we'll wrap up this lesson. In the next one, I'll show you how you can use layer mass like the ones you've seen here. But using them in a way that will give you more control over the areas that you want to keep sharp and the ones that you don't want to keep sharp. This will open up a world of possibilities when you're blending and merging different images for a focus stack together. I will see you there in the next lesson. 7. Simple focus stack using layer masks: Welcome back to the class y'all. Now that you've learned how to focus stack using Photoshop auto blend feature, I'm going to show you an alternate method to focus stack that involves using your own custom layer masks. As you saw in the previous lesson, when you use Photoshops Auto Blend, it creates the layer mask for you. Most of the time, it does a fantastic job blending the images together using these masks. Sometimes however, you'll encounter situations, especially as you advance in your photography and get into more complex editing scenarios where you'll want to have more control over these layer masks when you're blending images together. Especially when you're creating focus decks. Like I mentioned in the last lesson, understanding layer mass is an essential skill if you are a photographer, especially if you're using Photoshop Mass allow you to selectively reveal or hide certain parts of the image. Our goal when using mass to focus stack is to reveal the parts of the image that are super sharp, that are the sharpest, and to hide the parts of the image that are not so sharp mass allow us to take the sharpest parts of each image and combine them into a final image that is sharp from the foreground all the way to the background. Let's go ahead and work through this exact same series of photos. This time we're going to create the same focus stack, but create our own layer mass in order to do so. The first thing that I'm going to do here, like I did before, is rename these layers. I'm going to make sure that, let's see, the one on the bottom looks like I zoom in here is the sharper in the foreground. I'm going to rename this foreground. That leaves us the image that is sharper in the background. Let's rename that background. These are already ordered from foreground to background. I'm going to keep these just like they are here. The benefit to creating your own custom layer mask to focus stack is that you do not need to convert these from smart object layers into pixel layers. That is really useful because we can create our focus stack and still jump back into if I double click this Adobe camera raw, even after we create our final image, in order to focus stack using layer mass. Typically you will leave the bottom layer untouched. And start with the second layer, the layer that's directly on top of the bottom layer Again, in this example, this is a very simple example. When you start to get more layers, you'll work your way up from the bottom to the top. Here we just have a second layer. I'll have this layer selected, and we will add a layer mask. You can do that by clicking this square with the circle inside. Now we have a white layer mask applied to this image. What that's doing is showing all of this image. For this reason, because this layer mask, this white layer mask is revealing this entire layer, we're not going to see any change. However, if we convert this to a black mask, and we can do that by holding down command and then pressing E on your keyboard. We convert that to a black mask. And what that does is it hides this entire layer. It's essentially almost the same as just clicking the eye button and hiding the layer. There's no change if I hide and show this layer. Now the only thing that we can see is the foreground layer. We have all of the sharp detail in the foreground, but I want to show the detail in the background. What I'll do in order to show the background is I will select the brush tool. And you can select it in the tool panel, or you can press B. I will select a white brush. If we look at our colors here, black is selected. I can click the arrow buttons, and that will switch those colors. Now white is the brush color, or you can press X on your keyboard, and that will switch those brush colors back and forth. You want to make sure that your layer mask is selected here, because we want to paint directly onto the layer mask. All right, once you have your brush selected, I will bring the opacity of this brush all the way up to 100% I will bring the brush size up. It's pretty large brush. I can do this using the keyboard shortcuts control option. Dragging to the right. That's control option on a Mac. If I drag that to the right, I create a pretty big brush because I want to reveal a significant part of this image. Something about there looks pretty good. All I'll do is start to brush onto the photograph, the areas where I want the sharp background to be revealed. Since I focused about at the end of the lake, really at the water line, most of the reflection, pretty much all of the reflection here is going to be sharp as well as the background. I might bring that brush down a little bit so that we don't have any weird lines going on. All right, so if we look at the layer mask, it's been applied to the background layer, the white parts reveal. You can remember white reveals, black conceals the white areas are showing the background layer, we have all of the sharp detail in the background and all of the sharp detail in the foreground. Let's hide that layer. We can see that the softer unsharp background is shown when we hide this top layer. It's only when we turn the background on and have that layer mask applied. Now that we've created this layer mask, we can combine these layers into a single final image. The easiest way to do that is on a Mac, you use the keyboard shortcuts, command option shift, and the letter E. You press all four of those keys together, you will get a final image that has all of the layer mask adjustments that we made. We have the sharp foreground and the sharp background. The other way that you could do this, if I delete this layer, just drag that down to the trash, is select both of these layers. Right click, then click flatten image. I don't prefer to do this unless I know I'm 100% done editing this image because you can't go back and make adjustments to the layer mask, essentially make a permanent destructive edit. You really only want to do this when, like I said, you are completely done editing the image, which at this point I probably wouldn't be. I'll press command Z to go back again. Combine that image command option, shift E. Now we have this final image here. Let's say I made a mistake in creating my layer mask. I could just delete this layer. Click on the layer mask and let's switch the brush back to black. This wouldn't necessarily be something I do because I like how sharp the reflection is, but I could paint back this reflection. Let's say the reflection was sharper in the foreground Image, change the mask so that it really reflects the parts of the image that I thought were the sharpest. I'd probably have to come down and select some of that lake as well. All right. You can see before and after only this section is changing. And then I could merge these image back into a final single image. This would be the point at which I start to make some final edits. I could crop this image. Anything you want to do to enhance the final photograph, like I talked about at the beginning of this lesson, the benefit to creating your own custom layer mass is that, let's say you wanted to jump back into camera raw and adjust some of the background. If we're focused on just adjusting the background only that is going to be revealed when I double click on the thumbnail and create those adjustments. Actually, before I do this, I'm going to need to delete this top layer because that will hide any adjustments that I make. Click hot back into camera raw. Say I wanted to reduce the exposure just a little bit, maybe increase some of the saturation. I'm only paying attention to this area. This is only area that's going to be revealed by the mask. I could boost some of the shadows. We see a little bit more detail in the tree line below the mountains. Maybe increase the blacks a little bit. Just keep it at that for now. Now you can see that we've only made those adjustments in camera raw to the background. We could do the same thing to the foreground by double clicking on the foreground thumbnail. Again, we could increase some of those shadows, maybe boost the contrast a bit. Because this is in the shadows, we could cool down this part of the photo, which I like to do. When parts of the image are in the shadows, they're going to have a little cooler look than the parts that are hit by direct sunlight. We can just focus on making that targeted adjustment. I've overdone it. Here, just to show you what this looks like, all we see that change but it's not affecting the background background still maintains that warmth, the shadow detail. Once you've made these adjustments, that's when I would suggest combining your image into the final image. So your final focus stack command option shift. Oops, we'll fix that. You want to have the top layer selected before you combine them. Now we'll command option shift, create that final image. You'll see it's not a smart object when you combine the images, if I double click, I will not get back into camera. But once we have our image exactly how we want it, this is when I would prepare it for final tweaks and adjustments using adjustment layers and cropping and things like that. That is a very simple demonstration of how to combine two separate images using layer mass into a final super sharp focus stack image. For the rest of the course, we'll start to look at some more complicated scenarios that involve more exposures used in the focus stack. We'll see some examples that include time blending, exposure blending. These are scenarios that you will commonly encounter when you're photographing landscapes. I hope you enjoyed this lesson. I will see you in the next one. 8. Complete focus stacking workflow part 1: In this lesson, I want to walk you through a complete example of focus stacking from start to finish. Starting with exporting our photos out of light room, all the way to the final finished image that's been blended from all of our different focus stacking exposures. For this example, I have three separate images. If we expand this image, you can see that this is a really large depth of field image. Just like the last one, we have flowers in the foreground that are really close to the camera, all the way to some really distant mountains in the background. Even using 11, I was using a wide angle lens at 22 millimeters. Relatively large, depth of field to begin with. With these settings, I still wasn't able to capture everything in focus. Even if I focused at the hyper focal point somewhere around here, I still didn't get enough depth of field to capture this entire scene. I took three separate exposures, one for the foreground, one for the midground, and one for the background. We go back to the grid view, we can see these three separate exposures. Again, if I make this larger, we can zoom in and see the difference between these images. Actually, it's a little bit easier to see if I select the first one and go to comparison view. Scroll down to the flowers in the front. The flowers here are sharp. The flowers here are slightly sharp. I move to the third image, we're comparing the first and the third. The first image is where the flowers are the sharpest. This is the foreground image. This is the midground image, which we can see, the midground, pretty sharp, right in there. Then the first one is the background image. We can see how much sharper this first image is compared to the midground or the foreground image. What I'm going to do here, if I go back to grid view, is I'm going to export these photos directly into Photoshop, rather than the method that I showed you that I typically use earlier in this class. Exporting them to a folder on my hard drive and then opening them in Bridge and then Adobe Camera Raw, which is more of a complex way to open your photos in Photoshop. Just going to do the easier, faster version if you're a beginner, if this is the first time that you've started to do focus stacking, this is the way that I recommend that you start practicing. Just make sure that you have your photos backed up either on the cloud or in an external hard drive. If you do edit or accidentally delete your photos, you have backup copies. I'll select the first image, hold down shift, and select the third image. Now I have all three of these photos selected, then I'll just write, click on one of these photos, go to edit in like we did before. We'll go down to open as smart object layers in Photoshop. This will open all of these photos into Photoshop as smart objects all in the same windows. They should all be stacked up in the same layers panel. We'll give this just a second to load here, it can take a minute to open up. I will open up Photoshop that doesn't automatically pop up. There we go. All right, now I have all of my images opened as smart object layers in a single window. The first step is to rearrange these layers if I need to, in order from the sharpest foreground at the bottom of the layer stack to the sharpest background at the top of the layer stack. I also want to rename these layers. I know which image I'm working with. In order to do this, I will zoom in so that I can see what's going on a little bit more clearly. And I can tell right away that the image I'm looking at here, the flowers in the foreground are not sharp. If I hide this top layer, they are slightly sharp. This image is probably the foreground. If I look in here, it does look pretty sharp. If I hide this layer and look at the flowers, I can see that they are really sharp. In this photo, I'm going to assume that this is the foreground. I'll click on the name and rename this foreground if I turn this layer back on. Scroll up a bit, just to look up here a bit higher. I'm going to assume this is the mid ground. If I look up, I can see the background is pretty soft, especially compared to this layer. If I turn the top layer on, I can see the background is quite sharp. I can tell pretty easily that this is the midground, this is the background. Now these are already ordered from foreground to background. I'm going to keep my layers ordered in this exact arrangement. If I needed to, I could just click and drag these around. But I'm going to keep them in this order. You'll see in just a few moments why I like to keep them ordered from foreground to background. The next step is to do some editing to each individual exposure. This is a step that I could have done back in light room before I exported my photos into Photoshop. But I prefer to export them first and then edit them once they're in the layer stack over here in Photoshop. Towards the end of this lesson, I'll show you why exactly I prefer to do that. Usually when I start editing I zoom out here. I usually just start with the background. If I double click on the layer thumbnail, I will open up Adobe Camera Raw like you've seen before. Now I can make my adjustments to the background. Remember, this will only work if you're using raw files. If you're using Jpeg file, Adobe Camera Raw will not open up when you double click the smart object thumbnail. This is why I always recommend that you shoot in the raw file format. Once you have Adobe Camera Raw opened up, you can start to make your edits. And I'm just going to do some basic edits here. Starting with, I'm actually going to start with the highlights because I'm just adjusting the background. I'm going to focus on how I can enhance only the background of this image. I'm not paying attention to the foreground or the midground because eventually when the images are blended together, the background is the only part that's going to be merged with the foreground and the midground. My eye for these edits is only looking at what's going on in the mountains and the sky. If I bring the highlights all the way down, you can see that the sky has much better exposure. It's not washed out, it doesn't look over exposed. I can also add a little bit of exposure, increase the exposure. Just to lighten up the background a bit, I think I will increase the shadows just slightly to bring out some of the shadow detail in the trees below the mountain peaks and increase the contrast a little bit more. I might increase the blacks just slightly. It doesn't look too dark back there. If I go down to color, I will increase vibrant. I'm saturating some of the colors that aren't saturated already. Saturation will saturate the already saturated colors. That will really increase how dramatic the colors are in this image. I only want to bring that up just a little bit because I don't want it to look unnatural, especially there was no direct light hitting this area. It wouldn't really look natural to the eye to see very saturated colors. For now, I think that looks pretty good. I will click. Okay. I feel like the background has been edited to what looks good to my eyes. I'll go ahead and hide this background layer so we can work on the midground. I'll do the exact same thing. I'll double click on the thumbnail so that I open up Adobe Camera Raw. This time I'm only paying attention to the midground because this is the only area of this particular exposure that's going to appear in the final image. The midground needs slightly different editing than the background. We go up to light, we want to increase the exposure more because the foreground in the midground came out too dark. You'll see that I start to clip or blow out the sky. I'm not worried about that right now because the background of the image when I edit the mid ground is not going to be in the final focus stacked photograph. As I start to pay attention to the midground, think I'll do a little more contrast. Let's see, bring up the highlights. Some of these lighter rocks start to increase in lightness. We bring up the shadows a bit, let's see some of the whites. Again, I want to increase some of the vibrance and the saturation, but not too much. Again, this is all shadow area. If I increased that vibrance or the saturation too much and it's very easy to do, it would just not look great. We will click okay. Once those edits are complete, okay, I will hide the midground next and open up the foreground to make edits on the foreground. These edits will be pretty similar to the midground when I'm editing all three of these exposures. The goal here is to really make these photos look congruent. By that I mean that they have similar white balance, similar exposure, and not too much difference between the edits that when Photoshop goes to blend them together, it doesn't look unnatural. If I change the white balance, for example, too much between say, the foreground and the midground, it really would look weird in the final product. In the final photograph, I want to make very similar adjustments to what I did to the foreground. Just increase the exposure and the contrast. Let's see, let's bring up some of the blacks as well. Can actually boost the contrast a bit. Have a transition from higher contrast to lower contrasts that will help move the eye through the photo. I'm going to come down to first I'll go to color again, doing very similar edits as we did to the midground. Finally, for this particular exposure, I will go to the color mixer. Because we have these really bright yellow flowers in the foreground, I want to accentuate that in the color mixer. I can focus on editing a single color. If I go to saturation in the HSL sliders, I can go to the yellow slider and increase the saturation. You'll notice as I increase the yellow saturation, those flowers, if I overdo it significantly here, they get really heavily saturated. Now that's a little bit too much, so I'll bring it back down. I think I'll also bring up the luminants just to brighten the yellow flowers. If I just select the yellow luminant slider, pull that to the right. You can see as I do that, the flowers really brighten up. And that really makes the photo pop something about right here. The lighter I make this, the less saturated the yellow will become. I might increase the luminants. Then bring up the saturation once again. That's maybe overdone a little bit, but let's keep it there for now. I will click okay, great. Now that we've made our adjustments, I'm going to turn these layers back on. At this point, we are ready to blend our exposures into a single focus stacked exposure. Now there are two routes that you can go down to do this that you learned earlier in this course. The first one is that you can use Photoshops built in auto blend feature. The second is to create your own layer, mass, and paint in areas that you want to be sharp. The method that you choose to blend your exposures really depends on the photo as well as what you're comfortable doing. If the scene isn't too complex where it'll be easy to use my own layer mask and create custom layer mask to blend in the focus stack. That's usually the route that I will pick first. But sometimes there's so much detail in the image can be so complex that it can be really almost impossible to paint in your own layer mask. That would be a situation where you'd want to use Photoshop, Auto Align, and Auto Blend features. When you're first getting started with focus stacking and you don't have a lot of practice and experimentation under your belt, the best way to go is to start with Photoshops, Auto Align, and Auto Blend, and see how good of a job Photoshop does. Actually a lot of the time it does a fantastic job, especially if you're doing a pretty simple focus stack. But sometimes it's not always the best result. For this demonstration, I just want to show you the simplest, typically the most effective, way to do this focus step. That is to use Photoshop Auto Blend. In order to use Auto Blend, we will select all of our layers. Once you have one layer selected, select the top layer, hold down Shift, and click the top layers. Then we have all three of our layers selected. Next, we need to remove the smart object. In order to use Auto blend, I will write, click on one of the layers. In this men you go to rasterized layers. Now we've removed the smart object and lost the capability of jumping into Adobe Camera raw. While we have all of these layers still selected, the next step is to go to Edit, Auto Align. Layers have auto selected and click Okay. Again, this is just aligning our images so that they are in perfect alignment. Even when you use the tripod, they can slightly shift. The step is critical before we blend them together. All right, we have our photos aligned. The next step is to go back to edit, and then to auto blend layers, stack images, and click Okay. We'll let Photoshop do its thing here. Now we have our final image, which you can see here at the top of the layer stack. 9. Complete focus stacking workflow part 2: Let's zoom out of our image, is to take a look at the complete picture. I have to say that the color looks quite off. Photoshop has done a really great job getting the final image really sharp from the foreground to the background. But I really don't like the way the color turned out. Sometimes that can happen, the color can get a bit wonky. In this situation, I would prefer to go back and start over and create the focus stack, the final image using layer mass. We can do that quickly. Right now, if we go back in our history, you find your history in Photoshop, go all the way back to rasterize layer before we removed the smart objects. Actually, this is after we remove the smart objects. Let's go back one more step. Okay, now we have all of our exposures back. This is after they have been edited. They're edited and ready to go. We've just gone back before we removed the smart objects and we're just going to create our focus stack, but this time use layer mass. When I start the process of using layer mass to create my focus stack, I'll start from the foreground and work my way towards the background. This is the main reason why I like to organize my layers so that they are in a sequence from the sharpest foreground to the sharpest background. Usually, I leave the foreground alone and start with the layer above the foreground. Whatever layer comes next, I will add a layer mask to this layer. And we do that by clicking this square with a circle. Inside. This layer mask is revealing the entire exposure. This entire image is being shown because this is a completely essentially see through layer mask. In order to hide this layer with the mask, I can just invert it. I can press command on a Mac. Now that layer mask is black and it's hiding this layer. The other thing that you'll need to do is hide all of the layers on top of the one that you're working with here. I'll just hide the background. There were more layers on top. I'd have to hide all of those layers as well. All right, now that we have a black layer mask hiding the midground, we're going to paint in the areas of the mid ground that we want to show using a white brush. We'll have our brush selected. It's already selected. You can press B on the keyboard as a shortcut, make sure that the brush color is white. And let's increase this brush size since we'll be painting a pretty large chunk of this photo. In just in the areas of the mid ground that you want to be included. The sharpest parts of the mid ground, I'm going to paint in. I'll bring the brush size down and zoom in. You can sometimes see these weird artifacts here. That's where the blend is occurring. If you have a soft brush, I'll paint around this line of flowers up until about here. You can see what's going on in the layer mask is I'm revealing the areas that are sharp. We're only showing this middle area of the photo. If I mess up painting, I can just switch the brush color back to black. You can use these little arrows or press X on your keyboard. Bring this down just so I can have a little bit more control paint back the areas where we're getting this weird, soft, fuzzy area. This might take a little bit more time. It's definitely a little bit more time consuming than using Photoshops Auto Blend, but it will give you a lot more control the smaller you take your brush down, the more you can find tune what's going on. I'll switch that back to white. You can see I'm just trying to find the areas that are the sharpest. Just like that, bringing in some of these sharper flowers. I won't do this entire photo because that might take a little bit too much time for this lesson, but you can see what's going on here. Might have to work back and forth with a white. And a black brush, something like that. Looks pretty good for now. Okay, great, let's turn on our background. Let's paint in the background. We'll do the same thing. I will select the background layer, create a mask and invert this. It's a black mask command. On a Mac, I'll provide the keyboard shortcuts if you're using a PC. Now with my white brush selected, increase the size of the brush. You also want to double check that the opacity is at 100% That's also important here. Then I will just paint in the areas of the photo should be sharp. In the background you can see it's pretty similar to the photo that we got when we auto blended using Photoshops Auto Blend. But have more control over what's going on here. Here's the main benefit to using layer mass. Instead of removing the smart object and using auto blend. That's the fact that we can go back and edit our smart objects. If I double click on the background, I can still go back into Adobe Camera Raw. Adobe Camera Raw will allow you to retain a lot of the information from the original raw file. Once you remove the smart object, you'll lose a little bit of information and a little bit of control over the image editing process. That's something that I always want to avoid, especially because it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money to get to some of these locations. In this particular example, I had to backpack here on a four day backpacking trip. It was a lot of work. I don't want to lose any of the photographs information in editing process that I work so hard to get. Let's say we didn't like our original edit of the background. We wanted to brighten it up a bit. I could bring up the exposure. Again, I'm just paying attention to the background. Maybe I want to change the color balance. Maybe I wanted that region to be a little bit warmer. Just slightly. Again, you want this to be congruent with the other exposures. Increase the vibrance a bit. I could also go and increase the blue because there's a lot of blues back there that's overdone a bit. But for this example, we'll just roll with Click Okay. Now you can see that we were able to make edits to the raw file just in the sharpest areas of our image. Once you feel like you've finished all of your edits, I probably keep going with this one just a little bit, tweaking it here and there. But once you feel like you've done all of the edits that you want to do here, you'll select all of the layers once again, Shift, hold down, Shift, click the top layer. Then on your keyboard, if you're using a Mac, you will press command option Shift, and then command option shift. And that will combine all of your layers into a single layer. At this point, we could add in any final adjustments, we could crop this image. We could add some adjustment layers, say to brighten or add contrast to the image. Do whatever you need to do before you finalize your finished photograph and save it to your portfolio. What you just saw was the complete focus stacking workflow from light room all the way to the final blended image and Photoshop. For the rest of this course, we'll be looking at more advanced examples that incorporate time blending and exposure blending. I definitely recommend that you go back rewatch the last few lessons a few times so that you really get the hang of this skill before we jump into a bit more complicated focus stacking scenarios. With that, we'll wrap up this lesson and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. 10. How to focus stack with an exposure blend part 1: In this lesson, we're going to look at another focus decking example with a similar composition to the example that we looked at in the last lesson. But this time we're going to incorporate four separate exposures. And we're also going to introduce some exposure blending. Exposure blending, if you're unfamiliar, is a technique where multiple images taken at different exposures are combined to create a final image with a larger dynamic range. This is a method that's commonly used in situations where a single exposure cannot capture the full range of light and shadow in a scene, such as when you have a high contrast landscape. Let's take a look at this first image so you can see what I mean, if I enlarge this photo. This again was taken on backpacking trip up in the mountains of Colorado. What we have here is a scene like the last one, where we have flowers, some wild flowers that are so close to the camera, so close to the lens, that it was impossible to get this entire scene and focus from the foreground all the way to the background. I had to create a series of exposures at different focus points. For this series of exposures, I focused on the background, which is this particular image. I also focused at a few different points in the foreground. In the midground, we take a look at these other exposures, if I scroll through these here, starting with, let's see, it looks like this one is the sharpest in front, then the next one is slightly sharper behind the flowers. Then the midground is where I focused here. When I'm out in the field creating a series of images that I want to focus stack. Typically I start from the bottom, the foreground, and work my way from the front to the background. The reason that these aren't in the exact order from foreground to background, they're out of sequence, is because I actually focused at the scene many times. For each sequence that I focused at, I went through and looked at which ones were the best. I picked out which ones were the best in the foreground. Which single photo was the best in the foreground? The midground, slightly further back, and then the background. These have been picked out from all of the, probably dozens, if not, maybe 100 photos that I took of this scene that particular morning. Now circling back to the exposure blending, you'll notice that the exposure in these three photos is much brighter than in the first one. The reason for that is because it was nearly impossible, or almost impossible, to capture the entire dynamic range of this photograph with a single exposure. In other words, what that means is that the sky was either too bright or the shadows were too dark. What I did when I was out in the field, I took a darker exposure when I focused on the background to account for the sky and all the bright parts of this scene. If we look at the settings here, we have eight and the shutter speed is one 30th of a second. Then, to account for the darker areas of the foreground, I took a brighter exposure. We have the same exact settings, except that the shutter speed is one 60th of a second. The ISO I went up to 400. If we look back at the first image, the ISO was 64, is much lower. When I was outshooting the scene, a slight breeze was blowing these wild flowers around just a little bit, increasing the shutter speed by boosting the ISO helped me freeze the motion of the flowers. And it also helped me increase the exposure to make the foreground and the midground brighter. My intention when I was out shooting this scene was to blend these different exposures together while also creating a focus stack. This is where it can become a little bit more complicated and a little bit more technical, But it doesn't involve that much more work than we've done in the previous examples throughout this course. Now when you need to create more and more exposures to incorporate into a focus stack, you can see for example, here we have four images that's going to be blended together. It can be a lot more work once we get into Photoshop to get the settings for each of these photos even. What I mean by that is if we take a look at the three exposures that are very similar, the ones of the foreground and the midground, We really want to make almost the exact same adjustments in terms of brightness, contrast tones, color, things like that. For that reason, before I export these photos into Photoshop, what I'll typically do, this is if you're opening photos directly from light room rather than from bridge. I will select all of the photos that I want the settings to be equal. I'm going to leave out the darker exposure because that's going to have very different settings applied. When we start to blend these images together, I will select one of the photos that I want to edit from this series. Then I will go to the develop module, and like you saw in the last lesson where we started to make adjustments before our image blend, I will essentially do the same thing in this photo. We zoom in here, you can see that I focused on the midground. As I edit this photo, I'm really focused on both the midground and the foreground. What I'll do here is I'll bring the exposure down just a bit, Increase contrast. Let's see. I think highlights are okay, right there. Again, this is just a very rough edit. Increase the black slightly. I do want to bring it down because I slightly over exposed the foreground. Add in a little texture, too much vibrance, not too much color. Because these areas that we're looking at are not being hit by direct sunlight. Also cool it down, make the temperature a little bit cooler. Because this area is in the shadow, something about right there looks pretty good. The next thing I'll do is because these exposures have very similar settings, I will select the photo that I first adjusted, that I just adjusted. Then while holding down shift, I will select the third photo in this series that I want to apply these adjustments to. Once I have the three photos that I want to apply these adjustments to, I will right click on one of them, then go to Develop Settings, and then over to Sync Settings. What this will do is it'll allow you to apply all of the settings that we just made to that image to the other two images that we want to have the exact same adjustments on. If you don't have all of these checked, I'd recommend just clicking Check All, just so you cover all your bases. Depending on how many things you adjusted, then click Synchronize. Now as you can see, if we go back and scroll through these photos, they have the same adjustments applied to them. Since I already went ahead and made my adjustments to the foreground and midground exposures, I'll go to the background exposure, the darker one. Let me zoom out here a bit. I will make some adjustments to this one as well. I don't have to do this later in Photoshop, I'm just paying attention to the background because this is the area that's going to be blended in. I'm not worrying about the foreground because there's a light hitting these peaks. I'm going to shift the warmth to the right a bit, warm it up just slightly, maybe increase the exposure just a bit. It really starts to match what we see in the other photos. But I'm watching the histogram, so I don't clip the highlights so they don't blow out the sky and lose some information. If you are unfamiliar with how histograms work, I have an entire class on exactly how they work, how to use them, how to read them, especially when you're editing your photos. Check that out. Now we'll roll through this pretty quickly. I'll bring the highlights down just to bring the sky just slightly, maybe increase the exposure once again. If I over expose this image, I'll start to see clipping. On the right hand of the histogram, you can see some of this red appearing, indicating that I have overexposed the sky. Something about right there looks pretty good to my eye. I'm going to add a little more color here than I usually do because these peaks are getting direct sunlight. They're very vibrant, very colorful. They draw the eye towards the back of the image, That might be a little bit too much. We have quite a bit of orange going on in these peaks. Let's see for now that I'll be just fine, We'll keep it there. We can always go back and make additional adjustments. Now that I have made all of my basic edits to all of these exposures, I'm going to select the first one while holding down shift select the last one. You can either do this here in the film strip or you can go back to the library and to your grid view. Select all of these images. We will export these to Photoshop to edit in and open as smart object layers in Photoshop. Let's open up Photoshop to see where we're at. Sometimes it can take a minute, especially when you have many different photos that you're going to blend together. 11. How to focus stack with an exposure blend part 2: Great, Now we have all of our exposures opened as smart object layers in Photoshop. Immediately, I can tell that there are some adjustments I made that I do not like. For example, the background. I don't like how saturated I made it, especially the saturation of the greens. What I'll do, well, actually first we need to rename our layers and re, order them so we know which ones we're working with. Like we've done before, I'm just going to hide and show the layers just so we can see which ones are the sharpest in the background and which are the sharpest in the foreground. Clearly, this is the sharpest in the background. They should be in the same order that they were exported in from light room. I will hide the background looks like, let's see if I hide. This one looks like this, one is definitely the midground. We'll hide the mid ground and looks like this one is the sharpest in the foreground, at least for the flowers. We hide that. The flowers get a little bit softer. Yeah, this one, the foreground, we'll hide the foreground. This one is slightly behind the foreground. We'll call this for two. Just click and drag that above the foreground. Okay, great. So now that we have our layers ordered, I am going to go back to the background and double click on the thumbnail just to hop into camera raw. If we go up to light, you can see all of the adjustments that we made in light room. They're reflected in Adobe camera raw. They literally just transferred over. If I go to color, I'm going to bring this vibrant down because I think this is over saturated. But I will go to the color mixer and just boost the saturation of orange just slightly. I prefer to see the orange more intense in this photo than the grain. I think maybe the blue. Let's see what happens when we increase the blue in the sky. Blue and orange are pretty complimentary colors. I do think increasing saturation of the blue does look nice. Not too much. Something about like that. I do think that looks okay for now. I'll close. Cara, the next thing that comes to mind that I'd like to adjust are the wild flowers in the foreground. If I go into camerraw in the foreground, I want to bring up the color and some of the brightness in these little wild flowers here because it's really a focal point in this photograph. I've chosen to do this in the exposure where the flowers are the sharpest because this is the part of the photo that's going to be blended in when I create my focus stack, when I get my final focus stack image, let's zoom in on those flowers and go to color mixer like you've seen before. I'm going to focus on the color I want to bring out. We're only going to work on the red. When I'm in the saturation slider, I will bring the red slider up to increase the saturation. You can see how here's a lot of red color in those flowers and you can make intense as you'd like to. Clearly that's way too much, but we'll bring that down to about right there. Still might be slightly too much, but that's okay. Then in Luminance, I can bring up the brightness of just the red. I'll bring that up. You can see how just the flowers are increasing in brightness. As I lighten those up, I'll lose some of the saturation again. I don't want this to look unnatural, but just so you can really see it, well, I will overdo it just a bit. Something like that. Looks good. We can click on this eye to toggle the visibility that's before and that's after significant difference. That's pretty good for now. I'll click okay. I think now that these exposures are ready to be blended together so we can create our final focus stack image. I will select all of these layers. I'll click the bottom layer. And go to the top layer. Hold down Shift. Click the top layers. We have all of our layers selected. Remember, first we need to remove the smart object, convert these into pixel layers. If we're going to use the Photoshop Auto Blend feature, which is what I'm going to do to blend these together. To remove the smart object, we'll right click on the layers, rasterized layers. Now that the smart object is gone, we will go to Edit Auto Align Layers auto. Okay, our layers are aligned. Next we will blend them. Again, back to Edit Auto, Blend layers. Hopefully at this point you're starting to get the hang of this stack images. Okay, now we have our final focus stacked image. Looking at this right off the bat, I can see that Photoshop has done a really good job blending all the sharp areas, has made some mistakes. It looks like back in here in the background, but for the foreground, for the most part, it looks like it's done a good job creating a blend of the images. The problem I'm seeing here is that the color and contrast in the background looks odd. If I look at the mask here, it looks like it's included some areas from the other photos that I definitely don't want to be in the background. What I'm actually going to do to fix this is I'm going to start over just a little bit. I will go back in my history back to see when we rasterized layers, that now we have all of the original layers out, the smart objects. Now I notice that Photoshop did a really good job blending the first couple of four ground exposures. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to blend these together first. And then I'm going to create my own masks to blend in the midground and the background. I'll select these two layers. Go to Edit, Auto Align Layers like we've done before. Once those two layers are aligned, I will go back to Edit, Auto Blend layers images. Okay, I'm just blending the foreground and the slightly more distant foreground. Here we have our merged image of the first two foregrounds. Now that we have that merged image, I'm just going to hide the other two layers. Since we won't need those for now. I'm going to use layer mass to blend in the midground and the background. The reason that it would be really difficult to use my own layer mass to blend these two layers together is because the flowers have such intricate detail that if I were to paint using a brush around these flowers, we'd be extremely time consuming to create that mask. It's much easier to blend in these larger chunks in the background as you'll see here. In a moment, we'll leave the foreground alone. Assume that's the bottom layer. I'm just going to hide all of the top layers. That's just the background layer. Now we'll start with the midground. Now all I need to do is add this layer mask. A trick here is to hold down option while you click the mask button. That's option on a Mac while you create your mask. And that will make it automatically a black mask. Next, we just need to paint in using our brush. Using a white brush, you'll select your brush, make sure that it's white, opacity 100% I'll increase the brush size. I just want to paint in the sharp areas of the midground. I'm just going to paint in just something like that. If I zoom in, I can see the sharp areas that I'm adding in. And I'm going to bring this brush down so that make a little more fine tune these adjustments. Something like that. Looks pretty good for now. If I make a mistake, all I have to do is press X switch to the black brush and paint back in some of the detail that I might have lost if I cover some of those flowers. Now you can really see I've incorporated that sharp midground. Maybe fix some of this area right here. I'll switch to a white brush, maybe back to a black brush. There we go, Fix some of those artifacts. We'll just keep it like that for now. Okay. Finally the background. We will turn that background layer on. Add our black mask option, press the masks, we command Z, get rid of that, make sure the layer is selected before you click the mask button. While holding it on option, click that mask button, create a black mask to hide our background. And we're just going to reveal using a white brush. I'll switch that back to white and paint in the background. You can see that's really a dramatic change now that I've painted in the background. The last step is to combine all of these exposures into a single image. If I select the top layer, we'll press on our keyboard command option shift on a Mac that will merge all of what we've done into a single final layer. At this point, I'd probably dodge and burn this image. I'd add some brightness contrast to the tones. I'd make some final adjustments. And then I'd call it pretty much done. That's pretty much it for how you create a focus stack that incorporates an exposure blend. I know this might seem a little bit complicated and technical at first, but the more you play around an experiment, I know I say this all the time, I promise you'll start to get the hang of this. 12. How to open a focus stack in Adobe Bridge and ACR: Welcome back to the class. All this lesson is a follow up to the previous lesson. If you're not interested in using Adobe Bridge and learning the workflow that I used to open my photos from Bridge into camera raw, and then into Photoshop, which I showed you earlier in this course. Then you can go ahead and skip over to the next lesson. But for those of you who want to learn how to open and focus stack these images utilizing bridge, then stick around. I'm going to walk you through this relatively briefly in this lesson. Here we have the exact same exposures that you saw in the previous lesson, but this time we're going to open them up in bridge and camera raw. This is the workflow that I typically use instead of directly from light room. Now in the last lesson, I developed these photos in the developed module and synced the settings before I exported them to Photoshop. While this is the simplest way to open your Photos and Photoshop, and it's the best for beginners and demonstration purposes. I'm going to show you how I actually open my photos. This is how I virtually always do this. Just to reiterate what you learned in earlier lessons in this course on opening your photos into Photoshop. The reason that I don't like to develop my photos in light room is because once I develop them, I can change the raw files. I only want to use light room to organize my raw files. I don't want to edit them because I'm really afraid of making any permanent changes or any deletions that can occur if I edit my photos in light room. Light room should be entirely separate from the editing process. What I do is I export these to my hard drive. We will select all of these photos and right click. Instead of going to edit in, I go to export. I can click on Export. I do have a export preset and I teach you how to do this in my Photoshop class. You don't have to go through this whole export process every time, but if you're new to this, you'll go to export. I'm going to export all of these files into a folder on my desktop. That is just a folder where I keep all of the files that I want to edit that I want to open up in Photoshop, they're completely separate from Light Room. I will click Export. These are being transferred to that folder. If I go to Adobe Bridge, Bridge is set up so that the folder that these were exported to will automatically appear when I open it up. All of these are files. I probably have too many in here right now, but usually I only keep the ones that I'm currently working on. Now we can see that the photos that we want to edit are in Adobe Bridge. I'm going to select all of these photos just like we've learned before. You select the first one, hold down Shift and select the last one. Then I will right click, go to open in camera raw. Again, at this point, everything is completely out of light rooms. I don't have to worry if I change any of these settings that I'm affecting the photos that are stored back in light room. This is a similar process to what you learned in the last lesson. I won't go into too much detail here, but essentially I want to have similar settings on these three photos, the two foreground and the midground exposure. In order to do that, I can pick one that I want to edit, then I can make those adjustments. We bring the exposure down a little bit, increase contrast with some highlights. Again, just paying attention to the foreground shadows slightly increase the blacks just might bring the exposure down even more. We go down to color, we will cool this down just slightly, increase some of those colors to make those colors pop a bit more. All right, in order to apply these adjustments to these two other exposures, I will select the other two by holding down shift, I will have the other two selected go to this box with three dots. When you click on that box, you will get this menu. Then select Sync Settings. I will check all, just like we did in light room, all the adjustments are accounted for. And click Okay. You can see that those adjustments were applied to the other images. Now this was the darker exposure. The photo where I focused on the background and decreased the exposure. I will adjust this one as well, will increase the exposure, definitely increase the shadows. I'm trying to make these pretty similar to my eyes. When I get into Photoshop, they are congruent with one another. They'll really seamlessly blend with one another. Something like that looks pretty good for now, can increase some of those colors. I'll warm up the background not too much. Then with the first one selected, I will hold down Shift Select the last one, all of these photos are selected. And then I will click Open Objects button. Doesn't say open objects. Go back to that video in this class where you learned how to open images from Adobe Camera Raw as objects. And you will learn how to do that there. For now, I'll just click open objects. Adobe Camera Raw is built into Photoshop. It comes out of the box in Photoshop. When I click open Objects, all of these images are going to open as smart object layers in Photoshop. Now the four exposures have been opened into Photoshop. You'll see they're each opened as a smart object layer in a separate window. The last step, before we move into the editing process, which will be the same as the previous video, is to combine all of these into a single document. What you can do is right click on the layer in each window. Go to duplicate layer, then just send it to the document that you want to combine them into. The first document is the one we were looking at in the last lesson. We will send this to this document. You can tell by the numbers which one you are sending it to. If we go back to this one, let's see, here we go. We have that exposure combined with the first one. We can close this one and go through doing the same thing. Right click on the layer up, send it to this window. We can delete one more. Right click, duplicate layer, send it to this document. I'm actually not sure of a way to open all of these layers in a single window like you're able to in light room. But here we are, we have all of our layers back into a single window. At this point, the steps are exactly the same as you saw in the previous lesson when we start to name our files, order them, and then go through the workflow of blending them together to create our finished image. I hope that helps you out. With that, we will wrap up this lesson and I will see you in the next one. 13. How to focus stack with a long exposure: In this lesson, we're going to focus stack a series of images and also incorporate a long exposure. Long exposures and landscape photography are typically used to introduce motion blur. In this example, we're going to be looking at a composition of a stream and use a long exposure to create a soft, silky look to the water. Let's go ahead and take a look at this scene and the different exposures that I used to capture it. Here we are, back in light room. If I enlarge the first image, you can see I took a series of four images. What we have going on here is a scene where we have some leaves, some autumn leaves in the foreground and a little tiny water fall in the background. Like you've seen throughout this course, this image was impossible to get sharp from the foreground all the way at the bottom where we have leaves really close to the lens, all the way to the background. I had to take multiple exposures, focusing at different points throughout this composition. In order to get the entire scene sharp, I took one exposure, focusing really close to this leaf right here. This exposure accounted for sharpness in about this region of the photo. Then I focused on this rock. I would get about this area in focus. Then I took a photo focusing on the background. With these three exposures, I knew with the equipment and the settings I was using that I'd be able to blend these three images into one final sharp focus deck image. If we look over at the settings, all the settings are the same for the first three images. Start with the first. I had ISO at 400. Usually I try to keep my ISO base ISO of my camera, which is 64 ISO. I try to keep that around 6,400 maybe 200. But when I was shooting this scene, the leaves in the foreground were moving a bit. The water was pushing them around and they were floating just slightly. They weren't moving significantly, but 400 was enough to freeze these leaves in motion. I shot this at 24 millimeters, pretty wide angle lens at over eight. This is the sharpest F stop on my lens. I wanted to use eight if I could get away with getting the entire scene sharp while using the sharpest F stop on my lens for the shutter speed. I wasn't worried about setting the shutter speed here. And that's because I had my camera in aperture priority mode. The aperture was set in aperture priority mode. The camera will pick the shutter speed for you. That just makes life easier because the camera will pick the appropriate shutter speed for the exposure. At this point, I only wanted the shutter speed fast enough to freeze the leaves in the foreground. I wasn't worrying about creating that silky effect in the water at this point. Let's go down and look at these images. You can see that the first one is where I focused in the closest foreground about on that leaf. The second photo, like I said, I focused right here. We zoom in, You can see that this rock is very sharp. Most of this foreground and mid ground is quite sharp up until you get to that leaf in the foreground. The third photo is where I focused on the background. You can see the background here is really sharp If we scroll down the mid ground and especially the foreground is really fuzzy. That accounted for all three sections of this composition. Finally, after I created the focus stack, I took a long exposure. By that I mean I took a photo where I intentionally lengthened the shutter speed. If we look at this third image, the shutter speed was one tenth of a second. If we look at the long exposure, the shutter speed is 2 seconds. My goal here was to lengthen the shutter speed enough to get this silky soft effect in the water. You can see if I go back, there's a lot more detail in the water in this image. But I'd say that there's more of a rough, less pleasant aesthetic than when we create this soft look. You can see, however, in my settings, if you look back at the settings that I had to use an F stop of over 22 in order to lengthen the shutter speed up to 2 seconds. In addition, I also dropped the ISO down from 400 all the way down to my base ISO of 64. Now the reason that I didn't want to shoot the focus stack the entire scene at 22, and just keep two second exposure at the entire time, There were a few reasons for this. First is, like I mentioned, the leaves were moving in the foreground. I knew that they would be really blurry if I were to create one image using these exact settings. The other problem is when you shoot at smaller apertures, you can introduce what's called diffraction. Essentially what diffraction does is it causes the image to be slightly less sharp. The smaller the aperture, the softer the image will look. Because of this light phenomenon called diffraction. I won't go into the physics of why this occurs, but just something to keep in mind of why it's best to shoot at the sharper apertures of your lens, eight F 11, instead of the smaller apertures if you're doing a focus stack. When I was creating this particular exposure out in the field, I was only paying attention to what was going on in the water. I knew I just wanted to use this exposure to blend in the water. I wasn't worried really about anything in the background or in the foreground. Okay, that's an overview of the four different exposures that we're going to be blending together in Photoshop. Instead of going through and editing these images and exporting them out to Photoshop like you've seen many times throughout this course already. I'm just going to go ahead and jump straight into Photoshop, because I've already uploaded all of these photos into a layer stack. They're all opened as smart objects in this single window in Photoshop. If you've forgotten or gotten a little rusty on how to export and edit your photos before you open them in Photoshop, just go back to those previous lessons in the course. I'll walk you through exactly how to do this at this point. Like I said, I have already edited all four of these images. I have renamed them like you've seen in the workflow throughout this course. I have ordered them from the sharpest foreground to the sharpest background. At the very top of the stack, I have put our long exposure, which I just named as water, just to briefly cover some of the edits that I made. If I hide the top layers here, starting with the foreground, all I've really done here is increase some of the brightness and the saturation in the yellow leaves. I've increased the exposure of the foreground, increase some of the shadows. Very similar adjustments that you've seen me make throughout the other examples in this class. Same thing for the midground, really brightened up the leaves, increase the colors for the background, you can see a little bit different. I focused on just editing the background. I took down some of the highlights, increased some of the shadows so that we bring back some of the shadow detail under the rocks. Finally, for the water, I have decreased the highlights and increased the exposure. I wanted to bring out more detail in the soft look of the water and also increase the brightness of the water to really make that a focal point of this image. At this point, the next step, like you've learned, would be to get these photos ready to blend together. You know that the first way we could do this is to remove the smart objects and then go to auto a line and then auto blend our layers together. For this example, I want to have as much control as possible over the final result. Especially because we're going to be blending in the water right off the bat here. I just want to go ahead and decide to create my own custom layer mass and blend in the mid ground, the background in the water separately. If I take a look at the images that I want to focus, and if I hide and show the layers, you can see that the composition or the scene is not shifting really at all. We see a little focus breathing again because we're focusing at different points in the scene. But I've done a pretty good job here of keeping my camera extremely still from one exposure to the next. For that reason, I'm not going to use auto align. I'm going to go ahead and straightway. Just start creating my layer mask because these photos are already in really good alignment. All right, let's hide our top few layers. And we're just going to keep the foreground and mid ground like we've done before. We'll start with the layer above the mid ground and we'll create our layer mask. And I will hold down option. And click the layer mask button to create a black layer mask. And grab my brush. The brush is already selected. Make sure that your brush color is white. We are going to paint in the midground. We'll increase the brush size. Remember to keep the opacity at 100% We'll just brush in the mid ground. Just like that. I will zoom in as I try to get more detail. Bring that brush size down, something like that, because there's water in the middle of the scene. It makes it much easier to blend. I'm just really looking at the rocks right here. Let's see, those leaves look, that leaf looks pretty sharp. These rocks look quite sharp. Maybe I'll blend in some of the background here. But our background exposure will account for these rocks in the background which don't appear sharp when I paint them in the mid ground. Let's get some of these on the right side. Okay, there we go. So you can see in this layer mask, we're revealing all of the mid ground, all of the sharp areas of this particular exposure. We'll do the same thing with the background. I'll turn that layer on and then hide it with a black layer mask. I'll press option Click that layer mask button to create a black layer mask. Now the background layer is hidden, we'll just paint in the background with a white brush. We'll just paint in the areas of the background which are sharp. You can see a significant difference in how sharp the background just got. I'll just come down, make sure I got all of the sharp areas of that exposure. Remember, if you mess up here, all you have to do is switch back to a black brush. If you press X, switch to a black brush and you can see if you've made any errors, but it looks like, switch that back to white. Yeah, that looks better when it's revealed something like that. Looks pretty good. Now we have finished the focus stacking, part of this workflow. The focus stack is complete. We have everything sharp from the foreground to the background. All we have to do now is blend in the water. As the last step, we'll turn on the water layer and do the same thing. We'll go down to the layer mask button press option and then click to create the layer mask. The black layer mask is hiding this water layer this time because we only want the water shown. We're going to paint on only the areas where there's water. Sometimes this can be a little bit tricky, especially because water shifts and changes usually a lot from exposure to exposure. We're just going to go slowly using our white brush, bring this down a bit. We're going to need to use a little bit more control with that smaller brush painting in just the areas where we know there's water. Now we have those really beautiful silky water lines of that little water fall in the back. If we hide, this top layer can see what a dramatic difference there is that little bit right there. Increase this brush. I'm going to have to go around these rocks and this is the part where it gets a little bit difficult. You may have to go back and forth between your white and your black brush as you paint these areas in to see what looks best to your eye. Really the goal here is to make it look as natural as possible. I'm going to just do a rough edit rather than spend a significant amount of time painting in the water. I would likely spend a lot more time doing this and I have spent a lot more time working on this image. But you should understand at this point really what's going on. And be able to take the ins from here working on this photo. Bringing that smooth water effect into the areas where you know there is water. All right, Something like that. It's pretty decent for now, I might have to go back and touch some of these areas up a bit, maybe darken them down. Remember, because we kept our smart object, we can always hop into Adobe Camera raw. If I needed to darken the exposure because I thought the water in the foreground was a bit too bright, I could do that as well. All right, now that we've created the focus stack and then blended in the water, we can finalize this image as the last step. As we've learned before, we can flatten the image by pressing command option shift E. Remember to have that top layer selected. When you do that, now we have our finished, completely blended and merged photo like before, you can add in any adjustments. Add adjustment layers, dodge and burn, crop all the things you need to do to finish up and polish up your final photograph. That is how you create a focus stack that incorporates a long exposure. Continue to practice this because the more you do so, the more you'll get the hang of it, the better you'll get at creating these layer mass. That is it for now. I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 14. Fixing errors due to Photoshop's auto-blend: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at some of the common problems that you might encounter when focus stacking in Photoshop and the best ways to go about fixing them. Unfortunately, when you use Photoshops auto Blend to focus stack, it doesn't always do a perfect job when creating the final focus act image. Oftentimes you have to go in and clean up and fix parts of the image that Photoshop didn't blend properly. That's what you're going to learn how to do here in just a moment. First, we're going to create a focus stack of the two images that you see here. These are two photos that I shot with the telephoto lens out in Rocky Mountain National Park here in Colorado. If I enlarge this photo, you can see what's going on in the composition. This is a pretty simple scene where there are trees in the foreground that are pretty close to the camera, and mountains in the distance. If we take a look at the settings that I used to shoot this scene, you can see that I had an ISO of 100. The focal length is 240 millimeters, a pretty long lens that I used to take this shot. The F stop was over eight. And I chose this aperture because it's the sharpest aperture of this lens. The shutter speed was 0.4 seconds. The important thing to note about these settings is that I had a very shallow depth of field. Because I was shooting at a long focal length and a relatively wide aperture. The way I was able to get away using these settings in this scene with such shallow depth of field was that I knew I needed to focus stack. I knew that because there was a very close foreground and a very distant background, that I would only need two separate exposures, one for the foreground to get the trees sharp and one for the background to get the mountain sharp. I didn't really have to worry about a mid ground because there really wasn't anything going on between the trees and the distant mountains. If I go over to the second image, you can see that the mountains in the second image are much sharper and the trees in the foreground are much softer. The trees are extremely out of focus in the second exposure. Next, let's get these photos ready to export to Photoshop. This will mostly be a review if you've watched the entire course up until this point. Let's start with the first image. We'll just make some really quick, simple edits here. If I go to the developed module, let's increase the exposure. Is a bit too dark, you can really see the silhouette of the trees. And that's really what I was going for in this composition. Bring down the highlights, that is quite a bit too much. I was really saturated. This was at sunrise. I don't want to bring that down too much to over saturate the colors. Let's go to our shadows. Increase shadows a bit more. Now we can see some more shadow detail in the mountains. Just boost the color slightly. The sky is already very saturated. Just a little bit of color will look nice. White ballots looks pretty good, and maybe increase the contrasts just slightly. All right? Those are the only edits that I'm going to do for now. Next I will select the second image that we want to focus stack and holding down Shift, I will click the second image so that both of these photos are selected. Then I will right click and go to Develop Settings. And then over to Sync Settings, we'll make sure that all of these are checked. Always click Check all, and then synchronize. Now the second photo should look pretty much the same as the first toggle back and forth. You can see all of the settings applied to the first image have been applied to the second image. At this point we're ready to go and export these to light room. While both of these are still selected, I will write, click on one of the images, go to Edit In. This is the simplest way to open your Photos and Photoshop. If you don't want to go through Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw, we will go to open a smart object layers in Photoshop. All right, now we have both of our exposures opened up as smart object layers in Photoshop. The first thing I want to do here is rename and re order these layers. We need to determine which exposure is which the top layer, which is the one we're seeing here. You can see the trees are really sharp, that's likely the foreground. If I hide the top layer, the mountains are really sharp, that looks like the background layer. Let's rename these, I'll rename this one foreground, parentheses, trees. Rename this layer, background mountains. Okay, I want to arrange these from foreground to background. There we have the foreground at the bottom of the stack and the mountains at the top of the stack. At this point, if I wanted to, I could make some additional edits to these exposures by jumping into Adobe Camera raw. Remember, all I have to do is double click the thumbnail If I'm working with raw images and make any final tweaks before I create the final focus stack, I'm going to go ahead and assume that I've made all of the edits that I want to make and prepare these photos to focus stack. The next step is to select all of our layers. With the top layer selected, I will hold down Shift and select the bottom layer. Then I will write Click to remove the smart object. I will go to Rasterized layers. Now our smart object symbol is gone. Now we can align the layers. We can go to Edit, Auto Align Layers have Auto selected and click. Okay, now we have our layers in perfect alignment. The next step is to go directly back to edit, then down to auto blend layers have stack images selected and click Okay, Now we have our final focus stacked image at the top of the layer stack right away. I can see that Photoshop has made some errors in creating this blend. If I zoom in to the mountains, you can see that at the top it looks pretty sharp. But if we go down, this all looks extremely out of focus. It looks like Photoshop has included the foreground exposure when blending in the mountains, which is not what I wanted Photoshop to do. This is a common problem that you'll encounter when using Photoshops Auto blend, and it doesn't get it quite right. Let's look at how we can fix this. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to delete the focus stack, the top layer we created. I'll click and drag that layer down to the trash. In order to correct this, what we're going to do is make edits to the layer mass that Photoshop has created. Remember that when you're working with layer mass, the black part of the layer mask will hide the image, and the white part of the layer mask will reveal or show the image. What we need to do here is fix which parts of these exposures Photoshop thought it should hide, which parts it thought it should show. Let's start with the foreground. I'll hide the top layer. A trick that you can use in order to view this layer mask a little bit better is to hold down option if you're using a Mac and that's Alt. If you're using a PC while you're holding down option or Alt, click on the layer mask that you want to look at. I'll zoom out here so we can see this a little bit better. Now we can see the layer mask superimposed on top of the image. This sometimes helps when you are trying to decide which parts that you need to paint in white, which parts you need to paint in black. For this exposure, we want to reveal all of the foreground. I want all of the foreground to be painted in white. What I'll do next is grab my brush and make sure that the brush color is white. I'm also because I notice that this exposure has been selected. I'm going to go to select and select because I want to make sure that I can paint anywhere on this mask. Next, I'm just going to paint in all of the foreground or in other words, all of the areas that I know there are trees. For this situation, it'll probably be easier to just look at the image. I'll go and hide the mask again. You can hide the mask by pressing Option again on a Mac or Alt on a PC hold option or Alt and click on the mask. Now with my white brush, I'm just going to brush in parts of the trees that I know should be revealed. I'll paint in right there, paint some of the trees right here. Increase that brush size, we get the rest of that tree and make sure the opacity is at 100% While you're doing this, we'll get a little more of the tree in here. Okay, that looks pretty good for now, I think. Actually a few more spots right in here. Okay, great. Next we will paint in the background. I'll turn on the background layer. We will select the mask. While you have your white brush selected, we're going to paint in the areas of the background that we want to show. I'll zoom in, especially to the areas that I know where Photoshop has made the mistakes. Then I'll just paint on all of those areas that I want to be sharp that should have been included in the focus stack. It does get a little bit tricky once you start getting in areas where there is some fine detail. You can see that I started to include some of the tree in the background exposure. That's part of the tree that is not sharp. I want to hide the tree in the background exposure. I'll just switch the brush back to black. I'll press X on my keyboard to get my black brush back. Just paint that tree branch back in again, I am hiding the background here and revealing the foreground. Fix some of these branches in here. As you can see, this might take a while. I won't make this image perfect just for the sake of time. But hopefully you can see how this works. I'll increase my brush, go back to white paint more of that sharp background image back end. There's a large part of the background that was excluded back in here as well. You can see I'm bringing in a lot of the detail of the trees on the mountains back in. As I do this fix some of that tree branch, bring the brush down. Go back to my black brush, paint some of that tree branch back in. Go back to the white brush, press X. There's a big chunk of the sky. If I look at the mask, it's a big chunk of the sky that should have been included in the background exposure. And the reason Photoshop included a lot of this, that it shouldn't, is because the contrast was pretty low. It probably thought that this might have been part of the sharp areas of the image that I thought I wanted included. But it is not something like that. Looks pretty good. Get some of that sky back in, I can look at my mask. Again, that looks pretty good. For now, I would keep going trying to fine tune and refine the areas that should be sharp. But let's leave it at that for now. You get the idea of how this works. As the final step, what we're going to do is merge these exposures together, the sharp parts together. To do that, like you've seen earlier in this course, we'll make sure the top layer is selected and then use the keyboard shortcut command option shift E if you're using a Mac. Now we have our final layer. This is our final focus stack image. During the auto align process, we lost some information around the border. You'll definitely want to crop your final image. I will just a pretty simple crop here just to make sure some of the artifacts in the border that was created is removed. That border just comes from the focus breathing. When we're blending images together, the focus breathing causes that border around the outside. Now it looks like this image is good to go. That is how you would go about fixing some of the most common problems that you'll encounter when you're using Photoshops Auto Blend. I hope that helps all out, and I look forward to seeing you back here for the next lesson. 15. Conclusion + next steps: Well, it's time to wrap up this course y'all. If you enjoyed and got value out of this class, then I highly encourage you to go and rate and review it. If you'd like to continue learning with me, then I hope to see you in some of my other skillshare classes, which will all help you master landscape photography. I also encourage you to check out my website where I have tons of landscape photography, written guides and resources that will help you out as well. That's it for now, y'all. Thank you so much again for being here and I hope to see you again soon. Take care and have the adventuring.