Volkswagon Picture Stacking

 

Finished Merge

This was my first attempt at picture stacking.  Picture stacking is where you merge multiple images of a stationary object or landscape at different focal lengths and then in an editing program (Affinity Photo) focus merge them together to produce an extra-sharp final picture. Hold on, not entirely, there's post-merging, fine-detail, editing work to be done.  

Equipment: Fujifilm X-T5 Camera. Fujinon Super EBC XF 16-80mm 1:4 

Software:  Affinity Photo

Help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvMCUaGYNf8  

Process:  

In Affinity Photo (AF) you select FILE- NEW FOCUS MERGE and then add the pictures.  AF analyzes the pictures and combines them into one picture file.  It does a good job but there is still haze and artifacts from each picture that show up that need removed.  After AF merged the three pictures there were now four pictures in the Source Panel (the three original and the merged picture).  

The following three pictures are my original pictures.  I took three pictures (see below).

Front of car focus

Middle of car focus

Back of car focus

The next step is to remove the out of focus areas in each picture.  For example, when merged the front of car focus picture is sharp, but the back of car focus picture is overlayed, so the out of focus areas from the back of car picture show up on the front of car focus picture and vice-versa.  To fix this,  you use the clone tool to manually clone areas from specific source images.

Here's the process:  In the Source Panel where your pictures are located, there is an eye-icon at the bottom.  To clean up the front of car focus, I selected that picture and then selected the eye-icon.  The eye-icon makes that picture the source for the clone tool.  Next, I selected the back of car focus picture. I did not select the eye-icon because I need to keep the front of car focus picture as the source.  Once I selected the back of car focus, I began to drag the clone tool around areas that were blurry.  The clone tool was using the front of car focus picture as the clone and as a result, was removing the blurry areas. There was a bit of trial and error and EDIT-UNDUE, but I was learning and figuring it out. 

Final Thoughts: 

I was pleased with the final result but if I was to do it againg I would take more pictures than just the three I did take.  I would focus on more specific areas than just the fore-mid-background.  I believe that would have allowed me to get an even more pin-sharp final image.  

For this process to work, you have to use a tripod and the object must me stationary. For this project, I laid my camera on the desk and was very careful to not move it.  I also put the camera on a two second delay so there was no movement of the camera from me pushing the picture button.