Last spring I was shooting a basalt formation out near the Crooked River at first light. Gorgeous scene. Foreground rock maybe two feet from my lens, canyon wall stretching back half a mile. I knew what I wanted the image to feel like, and I also knew that no single frame was going to give it to me. Stopped down to f/16, took my shot, brought it into Lightroom, and stared at the result with the quiet frustration of someone who’s been doing this long enough to know better. The foreground was acceptable. The midground was soft. Nothing about it matched what I’d seen standing there in the cold.

Focus stacking isn’t a new concept to me, but I’d been sloppy about my process in the field. Then I came across William Patino’s tutorial on focus stacking for landscape photography, and it tightened up a few things I’d been doing loosely for years.

Why f/16 Isn’t the Answer You Think It Is

Most landscape photographers reach for a small aperture when they want front-to-back sharpness, and that logic makes sense on the surface. But stop down past f/11 on most modern lenses and you start losing sharpness to diffraction before you ever gain it back in depth of field. Patino makes this point cleanly early in the tutorial, and it’s worth sitting with. The sweet spot on most lenses, optically speaking, is somewhere between f/8 and f/11. Focus stacking lets you shoot in that range and composite your way to the depth of field that f/22 promised but never quite delivered.

What to Shoot in the Field (and How Many Frames)

The in-field process is straightforward, but the details matter. Patino recommends shooting on a tripod, which is non-negotiable here since any shift between frames will create misalignment problems in post. Set your aperture between f/8 and f/11, dial in your exposure, then take a minimum of two frames: one focused on the foreground subject and one focused on the background. For scenes with a complex middle distance, a third frame focused on that zone gives Photoshop more to work with.

The key is overlap. Each focus point should share sharp detail with the adjacent frame. If your foreground focus frame goes soft exactly where your background frame goes sharp, with nothing in between, the blend will show it. Patino’s guidance is to err on the side of one extra frame rather than assume two will be enough. In the field, that costs you thirty seconds. In Photoshop, it saves you twenty minutes of patching.

Use a remote shutter or a two-second timer to eliminate any camera shake from pressing the shutter button. Mirror lock-up helps too if your camera supports it. These aren’t fussy suggestions. They are the difference between a clean blend and one that fights you the whole way.

Loading and Aligning in Photoshop

Once you’re at your desk, open your frames in Photoshop as layers in a single document. The fastest route is through Lightroom: select your focus stack frames, right-click, and choose Edit In, then Open as Layers in Photoshop. With all layers selected in Photoshop, go to Edit, then Auto-Align Layers, and run the Auto projection. Even on a good tripod there is slight movement between frames, and this step corrects for it.

After alignment, go to Edit again, and this time choose Auto-Blend Layers. Select Stack Images, check Seamless Tones and Colors, and let Photoshop run. What you get back is a merged result with layer masks that Photoshop has generated automatically, revealing the sharpest portions of each frame. In most cases with two or three well-shot frames, this works remarkably well right out of the process.

Flatten the image, do your normal adjustments, and you have a single file with sharpness that a single exposure simply cannot produce.

Where This Process Gets Complicated

Here is the one place I’d push back, or at least add a caveat from my own experience. Focus stacking works beautifully in still scenes. Introduce moving water and you introduce a problem. Each of your frames was captured at a different moment, which means your waterfall or your river will be in a different position in each one. Photoshop’s auto-blend will make strange decisions about what counts as sharp in a moving subject, and the result can look blended in a way that reads as wrong even if you can’t immediately explain why.

My workaround for moving water is to focus stack only the elements that are stationary, then blend in the water separately from a single long-exposure frame using a hand-painted mask. It’s more work, but it respects the reality of what was actually in front of the camera. Patino’s tutorial focuses on the cleaner use case, which is worth learning on solid ground before you start solving for rivers.

The Technique That Changes How You See in the Field

The real value of understanding focus stacking isn’t the Photoshop workflow. It’s that it changes how you stand in front of a scene. Once you know you can composite sharpness in post, you stop compromising your aperture to chase depth of field. You shoot optically clean and composite intelligently, and the image quality gap between what you saw and what you render closes considerably.

Watch William Patino’s full tutorial for the visual walkthrough of both the field capture and the Photoshop steps. Seeing the layer masks populate in real time makes the whole process click in a way that reading about it cannot fully replicate.