The Art of Focus Stacking - Matrix Software

Processing Focus Stacks
Lightroom and Photoshop
I don’t want to get too technical here, but it might be
useful for you to get a visual idea of how your stack of
photos is processed, so here is a quick run through.
I use adobe Lightroom 2.6 to not only catalog all my
photos but also to develop and touch up photos. It really
is a great program, a comfort to use. But to stack
photos I use Adobe Photoshop CS4. Luckily Adobe
has seen to it that these two programs work seamlessly
together so that I can send two or more photos
from Lightroom to Photoshop and back with no trouble.
I will show you how I do it, but you, of course, will
come up with your own favorite methods.
After I input my photos to the Lightroom catalog I go
through them to find the stacks and mark them, so
that I don’t mistake a stacked series of photos from
just a standard shot or two. So I go through my new
photos and mark the beginning of each stack with a
green border which tells me this is a stack that runs
from the green photo until the next different shot. Here
is a screen shot from lightroom on the next page.
As you can see, near the upper left-hand corner, I
have marked a photo with a green border as the first
in a series of four photos. In this case the photo is of
a dying tree trunk that has been drilled out by one of
Michigan’s Pileated Woodpecker, a bird with a body
about a foot and a half long!
You can see the stack of photos both in the main grid
view and in the loupe view running along the bottom of
the screen as well. There are some other stacks following
this one that are visible.
Lightroom and Photoshop are the trademarks of
Abobe Software, Inc.
Archiving Photos
I take lots of photos and their individual size keeps
getting larger, what with sensors with more megapixels,
like the Nikon D3x, etc. What to do with them?
How do I protect them from… whatever?
It is good to have as many copies of your photos as
you can manage, and stored in different places at
that. I have my computer set up so that when I copy
a new set of photos from a flashcard they are written
simultaneously to two separate hard drives. This is
accomplished through RAID formatting which always
keeps two copies of all files, separately. Therefore, if
one disk goes down, the other (hopefully) is intact. In
addition, I also copy all the files to a third disk for even
more protection.
I use Adobe Lightroom to keep track of my photos,
as well as to do most developing tasks, like light-balance,
tone, sharpening, and so on. I store each day’s
photo shoot in a separate folder by date, in the format
“YYYY-MM-DD” so that they can appear sequentially
and be sorted by date.
Lightroom has strong keyword capability and attributes
you can tag a photo with, such as “Keep,” “Reject,”
plus five colors and five star ratings. As for keywords,
you can enter almost anything and find it later. I use
the color, five-star rating, keep & reject attributes all
the time, but tend to fall behind on writing out all the
keywords. I do tag my “Keepers” in red, so a search
for all red-bordered photos let’s me find the most important
ones quickly.
I like to browse through my entire collection from time
to time, just because I often find photos I have overlooked
for one reason or another that now I have a
use for or can touch up to make them useful.
PC or Mac Computer
I have both a Mac and PC and work with images on
both machines, although I do more video work on my
MacPro and still-photo work on the windows-7 PC.
Both computers can handle 64-bit applications. As for
monitors, I have used two monitors for years and find
the extra room indispensible. Lately, I have switched
to a single 30” monitor.
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