5 replies to this topic

[Mike G]

I'm not sure of what stacking is done for, please enlighten me.

Presumedly it's putting one photo or more on top of each other?

[nfoto]

In an indirect manner, yes. Basically you run a series of shots in which focus is slightly shifted, then let software pick the areas which are sharp from each individual frame and "stack" them into a single frame.

The underlying idea is to get "deeper" depth of field than you can achieve just by stopping down and hopefully you can get much better overall quality at the same time.

A related approach is stitching in which frames of the same subject (taken to include different parts of it) are combined into a final image. This picture will have a wider field of view and at the same time, contain more pixels, than each separate frame.

Stitching and stacking can be combined, but this is cumbersome and time-consuming.

[Elsa Hoffmann]

Mike - Michael Erlewine does this is such a beautiful way - understanding how its done and does it properly - I hope he will reply here.
He also has written quite a bit on the subject and has some books available - for free - on his website.

[Mike G]

Elsa and Bjorn thank you very much, I understand a little more. I thought it might be a variation of HDR which I'm not a fan of.

This is an example of why I'm a fan of NikonGear almost instant answers, brilliant.

[Mike G]

I have downloaded one of Michael's PDFs and I shall have a good read of it, thanks for the tip Elsa.

[HansC]

Mike, HDR is also stacking, in particular to find the "best" exposed part of the various images to squeeze a much larger dynamic range into a regular picture than possible with the capture device (your sensor).

Quite usually, it's the tone mapping that isn't to many people's tastes. The actual HDR before tone mapping isn't really visible, as it contains too much dynamic range for the current display devices.