![]() When I do the manual blending, I look for the transition between middle ground and background. You can see my go-to settings in the screenshot below. Inside Helicon Focus, I usually use Method B to stack the photos by clicking on Render. I load the exposure blended image and the photos taken with different focus into Helicon Focus by right-clicking on one of them and then selecting Export - Helicon Focus (TIFF). That's different from the DNG workflow, which I showed in my last article about Helicon Focus. Since I saved the blended photo as a TIFF, I have to also perform the stacking with TIFF files. Helicon Focus allows me to perform the stacking on both DNG and TIFF files. Combining Focus Stacking and Exposure Blending In Photoshop, on the other hand, I have much more control over such areas, which is why I prefer to do the blending there. If I try to extract all the details there, I sometimes notice aliasing. But be careful: I found that the HDR blending in Lightroom can introduce artifacts at high-contrast edges. For architecture and cityscape photos, it can work pretty well. If you don't want to use Photoshop, you can also give the HDR feature of Lightroom a try. Because I opened the photos directly from Lightroom, the saved image will automatically appear in Lightroom. Then, I flatten the three layers down to one and save the result. I select the three photos, right-click on one of them, and go to Edit In - Open as Layers in Photoshop, where I use a mix of standard masks and, if necessary, luminosity masks to perform the exposure blending. Next, it's time to blend the exposures for the background. It makes the blending much simpler as I show in the feature video. ![]() Then, I try to equalize the brightness in the three bracketed exposures so that the dark and the bright exposures look similar to the other photos of the series. In Lightroom, I first apply my typical raw adjustments to one photo and then synchronize the settings over all the stacked and bracketed images. So, I still need Photoshop for this part. Helicon Focus does not support exposure blending, as it isn't designed for it. But how can I incorporate exposure blending into this new workflow? But for a few weeks now, I do focus stacking in Helicon Focus, which is faster and gives me better results. Instead, I focus manually and keep exposure bracketing active the whole time.Īt the end of the video above, I show my old focus stacking workflow in Photoshop. If that's the case, I don't use automatic focus bracketing. I will also adapt the workflow if I need multiple exposures for other parts of the scene. For example, you might photograph a glowing sunset where you first want to capture what's going on in the sky and then perform the focus stacking. The above order can be switched, depending on the scene. This is typically sufficient to achieve a clean blending result in post-processing. ![]() I focus on the horizon and capture three bracketed exposures, separated by two stops, to capture the complete dynamic range. I capture a series of images focused on different points in the scene by using the automatic focus bracketing feature of the Canon R5, which many other modern cameras also have, or I can manually change the focus for a series of images. So, my workflow, which I show in the video above, is the following: Unfortunately, the R5 and other modern cameras don't yet allow the combination of automatic focus bracketing and exposure bracketing.
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