20 image focus stack
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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Lichen
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Very cool! Are you using a rail to move the camera? Changing the focus through the lens? Moving while handheld? Curious about your process. I also like to experiment with focus stacking
I didn't use a rail. I may do that in the future as macro lenses are really expensive and I can buy a manual one for about 50% of the cost of an autofocus lens. For now I'm using a cheap kit lens with a pseudo macro function and 26mm of extension tubes. The lens I used here was the Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 EZ which is an autofocus lens. I mounted the camera to a tripod for this shot. I'm a cheapskate so all editing was done using open source (darktable and PetteriAimonen / focus-stack) software.
I'm quite new to all of this and having a blast tinkering around to see what works.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I have been using RawTherapee + enfuse, and I am curious to try out darktable + focus-stack.
I will need to look into RawTherapee for stacking, I tried to figure out Darktable but was a bit much for my brain. I used to just use CombineZP but I've switch just about all my computers to linux and have to dualboot into windows to use that program unfortunately.
RawTherapee is for manipulating raw image files. The process of aligning the images and focus stacking with enfuse is described here: https://patdavid.net/2013/01/focus-stacking-macro-photos-enfuse/
Thanks, I use RT for importing into Gimp but haven't experimented much outside of that. I'll see if I can get Effuse to work.