# Increasing the depth of field in Model Photography



## Lemonhawk (Sep 24, 2013)

Well I had to try this. Its called Focus Stacking and the idea is to to take a lot of pictures with a different focus setting the using some processing you get a spectacular depth of field, like what might be achieved with a pinhole camera and really bright lights.
What you need is a camera that has a manual focus option - this does not work if you can't vary the focus. I set up a tripod that looked down my track where I have a wooden bridge with my 4-4-0 on the track and a Pacific in the background. I took 50 shots using a slightly different focus setting, then processed then thru Helicon Focus. Here is the result, first a shot showing the normal one shot picture then the one where the 50 shots were processed thru Helicon Focus. 
















One of the advantages of Helicon Focus (it has a 30 day trial and and under $50 purchase price - I have no connection to this software) is that it can operate in raw camera files (besides JPG's and then output DNG format files. (If you are not familiar with raw camera outputs or DNG don't worry you don't need to use it). Having a really great DOF in your model pictures just makes them look that much more realistic.


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## Mark VerMurlen (Aug 15, 2015)

Very nice results! Having the right tool for the job works wonders. I'll have to give this a try myself.

Mark


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## Fire21 (Mar 9, 2014)

Hey, that IS cool. The multi shots really lightens things up too...the top pic is pretty dark on the loco.


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## Lemonhawk (Sep 24, 2013)

I lightened up the final result to make the color more natural and correct for the LED light bulbs from the ceiling fan. I did not mess with the single picture to correct that since it was not something that would be printed. The actual photos were all raw olympus output (ORF files) with the Helicon Focus processed output in DNG format (a raw format that has a non-proprietary format). Lightroom was used to tweak the color. The file size of the output file was 44.1 mb where as the file size of one of the input files was 11.1 mb. The actual output file remains sharp even as you crop or zoom in, another effect of the focus stacking - increased pixels! You also have control of the background as you can simply not include any photos that have the background in focus. All sorts of things to be messed with. This was my 2nd attempt at doing focus stacking so the learning curve is short! First attempt was on a flower outside that bobbing back and forth it the wind and I used too few photos. I then remember the reason I wanted to do this was to take pictures of the trains - not the flowers!


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