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major_clangerA few weeks ago I posted some macro close-ups of fossils taken with the aid of a DIY softbox I'd cobbled together. The softbox nicely solved one problem of macro photography - that of getting even illumination - but still left another.
With macro photography you often end up with very limited depth of field. The distance between being in focus and out of focus can be only a couple of millimetres, making it almost impossible to get the whole of a 3-D subject sharp. The usual way of increasing depth of focus by using a really small aperture doesn't necessarily help, in that past f/22 you start to get blurring from diffraction. However, photo editing applications offer another approach: take several pictures whilst progressively altering the focus, then merge together the sharp bits of each one to give a final composite that's in focus from front to back. This can be a bit fiddly, especially as another problem with macro photography is that you tend to get a slight magnification change as you shift focus. However, Photoshop CS3 has a very nice auto-alignment tool that works very well for slightly stretching and registering the successive pictures; some careful use of layer masks then in effect lets you 'paint out' the blurred areas to leave only the sharp ones.
The results seem to have come out very well - click on the thumbnails and select 'original size' to get the full effect.
With macro photography you often end up with very limited depth of field. The distance between being in focus and out of focus can be only a couple of millimetres, making it almost impossible to get the whole of a 3-D subject sharp. The usual way of increasing depth of focus by using a really small aperture doesn't necessarily help, in that past f/22 you start to get blurring from diffraction. However, photo editing applications offer another approach: take several pictures whilst progressively altering the focus, then merge together the sharp bits of each one to give a final composite that's in focus from front to back. This can be a bit fiddly, especially as another problem with macro photography is that you tend to get a slight magnification change as you shift focus. However, Photoshop CS3 has a very nice auto-alignment tool that works very well for slightly stretching and registering the successive pictures; some careful use of layer masks then in effect lets you 'paint out' the blurred areas to leave only the sharp ones.
The results seem to have come out very well - click on the thumbnails and select 'original size' to get the full effect.
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Date: 2007-12-04 10:41 am (UTC)