Digital Light & Color

Hi,
can PWP be used for Focus stacking not just HDR?

thx
afx

With a lot of work you might be able to use PWP to do some rough focus stacking, but I recommend using software specialized for this purpose if you are at all serious about it.

Thanks, I just needed configurmation.

cheers
afx

1. The Wikipedia article on the subject provides a list of programs, some under GPL license.

2. Could the PWP High Pass filter do the job? It would be used on each image, and the recipe for combining them is... ?

If one can build a mask of the in-focus areas of each image of the series its a simple Stacking or Compositing with the respective mask.
As the image size changes slightly usually when changeing the focus at the lens it needs registration of the 2 images, but that can be done with Composites Register option.
So, it's doable, it all depends how complex the mask has to be.

I spent some time experimenting with this several years ago and it's very difficult to get the masks and image registration right. Most of the programs I looked at that do this also build a depth map so they recover some of the third dimension.

While the general case of focus stacking is complex as Jonathan states, there are simple cases too. This link http://www.dl-c.com/Temp/features/Wilki ... _main.html shows how to combine images for more depth of field for cases where foreground and background are in separate images.

Kiril