Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Beginner's Questions => Topic started by: sanfairyanne on June 04, 2022, 05:19:08 am
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Back in around 2014 I focus stacked like my life depended on it. I assumed I could shoot all my images at the sweet spot, get awesome depth of field and have none of the concerns surrounding diffraction issues at smaller F-stops. I'm told now in 2022 that many of the new Ai programs can drastically improve a soft image. I know focus stacking will still have its place for macro work, but for landscape images I'm wondering if it's still as widely used. I can well imagine one would be wise to focus stack rather than shoot at f22, but what about f13 or f16. An f16 24mm shot might capture enough depth of field without all the hassle of focus stacking, perhaps some softness could be removed with Topaz Ai sharpen.
When we also realise that we cannot use focus stacking in raw smart object layers we can see we're further degrading our work when focus stacking.
We're now seeing focus stacking built in to many new cameras but should we really be using this?