Focus Stacking With My Brand New Sony A7RV

AeroPhotographer wrote:

Gilbert1 wrote:

AeroPhotographer wrote:

This is the first Sony camera to offer focus stacking. It arrived yesterday and I immediately tried stacking.

I've never done this with any camera, but found it easy. Before the shot you select the spacing between shots (which is an arbitrary number from 1 to 10) and the maximum number of shots. Tutorials recommend setting a large maximum, like 50 shots. It begins where you focus (nearest spot in the scene) and steps outward until focus reaches infinity and the sequence stops, hopefully short of your maximum.

The rate is about 2 shots per second.

Here is a stack of 20 frames, downsized for sharing. I set the max at 50. It stopped after 25 frames. I discarded the last 5 frames and stacked the first 20.

I first tried stacking in my (favorite) ACDSee editor, but did not succeed. Then I tried Helicon Focus which took less than 30 seconds to merge twenty, 61mp frames.

Interesting. Can you also use Lightroom for focus stacking? Or is it better to use Helicon in this case?

I don't use Lightroom. But I've read that it can stack.

Not in Lightroom, but in Photoshop.

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography/discover/focus-stacking.html

I’ve read posts from folks that get great results in PS. I’m not sure what they are doing to achieve those results but I’ve never found PS to work nearly as well for me as Helicon Focus. Below was done in Helicon and I find it was easy to learn how to use, at least the basics.

Also great to see that SONY finally added focus stacking. I enjoyed using an A9 and then A9II for awhile. Wonderful cameras and great lenses. The A1 menu update looked really good as well.

Never understood why they took so long to add stacking. Has become such a common tool for both landscape and macro work. Essentially every single other manufacturer has the feature on even their entry level cameras. I believe SONY was actually the only manufacturer of ILCs that did not have this feature.

So, they led the way with mirror less cameras tech and then were last to the party with one of the simplest features that probably took nothing more than a five minute software tweak. Better late than never

Will be interesting to see if the feature carries over to their other models subsequently released. Most manufacturers offer stacking across the board in nearly all their models and don’t limit it only to cameras marketed as those for landscape, for instance.