How to Focus Stack Panoramic Images

Over the years, focus stacking has gained wide popularity among digital photographers and is a handy technique you can use to get crisp images. However, how can a photographer use focus stacking when shooting panoramas? Digital panoramic photography often requires three, five, or more images to be stitched together in order to produce the desired end result. When combined with focus stacking, the challenges suddenly become bigger. This article explores those challenges and recommends tips for successfully creating a focus stacked panorama.

Focus Stacking Digital Images

The purpose of this article is not to explain what focus stacking is and how it is done. It assumes that you already know how to do that with single-shot photographs.

However, to recap briefly, focus stacking is the process of photographing the exact same scene with the exact same camera settings with multiple shots. The only difference among those shots is the focus setting of the lens. The purpose is to capture multiple shots where some focus on the foreground, others on the middle ground, and yet others on the background of the scene. Those images are all blended together afterwards with software in order to contain only the sharpest parts of each image. Thus, the end result is a photograph which is in perfect focus from the closest to the furthest objects.

This article also assumes that you know how to do basic panoramic photography, both in field and photo stitching in post-processing.