Photoshop How To

“Focus stacking” is a powerful image-editing technique for increasing the apparent depth of field in an image, and it’s relatively easy to accomplish. The idea is to shoot several photos of a scene at slightly different distances, and then merge the sharpest portions of each shot using Photoshop, Lightroom or another editing program.

While this this technique is often associated with macro photography, it works equally well for cityscape and landscape photographs, as you can see in the video below from acclaimed British nature photographer Thomas Heaton.

In just eight minutes, Heaton demonstrates the simple process he used to shoot and stack three photographs to create a final image with extreme depth of field. He begins by opening his three unedited Raw files in Lightroom. As you’ll see, the shots are nearly identical, apart from the intentional shifts in focus.

Once in Lightroom, Heaton makes minor adjustments to exposure, adds a bit of clarity and sharpening, and introduces a grad filter to darken the sky in all three images. When he’s happy with the look and tonal range of all three images, Heaton moves over to Photoshop to precisely align the layers and do a bit of cropping.

The final step is to return to Lightroom to add subtle vignetting and merge all three images into one killer shot. You can find more shooting and editing tips from Heaton on his YouTube channel, and be sure to look at an earlier focus stacking tutorial we posted from another top pro.