Justin Cary PhotographyAuto-Blending Depth of Field (Photoshop CS4)
I’m working on a huge project that is largely based on quality product images. I’m putting together a 60+ page catalog and now that I have my layout nailed down it’s time to shoot the 150+ photos. I’m using Adobe Lightroom to make all the adjustments to my raw images, Adobe Photoshop to do any heavy duty photo editing and Adobe InDesign to assemble the catalog. Ahhhh, Adobe, seamless in every way.
So, I came across an issue while shooting the stock images for the catalog… Consistent DOF across the board is crucial for the continuity of the catalog. There are two ways I can achieve this. 1.) Shoot at an f/22 or higher or 2.) Shoot a series of images with different DOF points and blend them in Photoshop.
A little secret, I’m shooting at an f/22 so I don’t have to bring the images into Photoshop each time to doctor them up, but for the purposes of this entry we are going to open up our images in Photoshop to use their very cool Auto-Blend Layers feature.
OK, so here are my three images:
You will notice that the images all have different focus points. When shooting product for a catalog you really want to achieve a very large DOF so that every portion of your product is as sharp as it can possibly be.
With that being said. Let’s open up the three images in Photoshop. I have opened them up and layered two of the images on top of the third one, your layers should look something like this:
Now select all of the layers by clicking on the top layer, holding down the shift key and clicking on the bottom layer. Go to Edit > Auto-Align Layer > Auto and click OK. This will align the three images to make the next step go a little smoother.
Now that your images are aligned, make sure all of the layer are selected and go to Edit > Auto-Blend Layer > Stack Images, make sure Seamless Tones and Colors is checked and click OK.
Your images should look something like this. You’ll notice that it isn’t perfect but it does a pretty dang good job.
