How to merge Focus Stacking images in Photoshop 

Using focus stacking in one program, PS, instead of two, PS + Lt, is GREAT!! Most educators, including Adobe, use Lt+PS!! Thanks a lot!

Great tutorial, straight to the point instead of 30 minutes stre-eeeeeeeeeeee-ching to make it artificially long to put more ads. Love short format.

At last, a genuinely easy way to understand the process of focus stacking in Photoshop that doesn't use Lightroom first. Thanks so much Gary :)

Thank you!!! You saved me an hour of work!!!

Clear and easy to follow for intended results rather than follow endlessly micro detailed tutorials.

Excellent!!! Thank you!

thank you

Thank you Gary. I like your simple way of explaining what needs to be done in focus stacking. It's funny that whenever I attend a lecture, there is always a wise guy who stands up, grabs the microphone then explains as if he is the main speaker. The honorable man however just sits down there, listens, then assimilate what the subject is all about but remain silent.

A great simple video, thank you! I feel for your waiting, had to upgrade my laptop now because I walked all over the Earth twice before exporting single image in lightroom 😂

Excellent explanation Gary.

Always the best explanations dear Gary

Greetings from sunny, Central Texas! Excellent, easy-to-follow tutorial with superb images as the outcome! Thank you, Gary. I have found that this works particularly well with my Canon kit lenses for overall detail and sharpness! With a tripod, remote shutter release and manual focus, combined with the Live View, you can create one image from many that can easily compete with much more expensive lenses. I can also see that combined with automatic exposure bracketing, the sky's the limit! VERY NICE!!!

Sorry to bump, but found this very helpful on my first attempt at focus bracketing! Thanks for taking the time and also not plugging other things!

Hi Gary...thanks again for another well done video. Did you once do a workshop on Maui with Randy Hufford?

For those of us without Photoshop, Helicon Focus is the go-to tool.

Gary, long time reader first time writer ;) Great video. I've been doing focus stacking like this for a few years now, and I find that PS can be a bit difficult at times. I've never had things go perfect once. Usually I have to eliminate a photo out of the stack, change masking, or something like that. I hope PS gets better at doing it in the future.

Thank you for this Gary. If I understand correctly, you are saying that Photoshop decides which bits of which images to use -- you don't have to select bits of each layer manually? I hadn't realised it could be that simple!

Wow, nice!

Great to the point video. I really like it. I just got the new PS Adobe photoshop 2022 and tried each step by step to see if it would work. It did not. It worked right up until the second I hit edit to open the blend layers and the auto align access lines. The entire scroll box was gray and unresponsive. Only got it to work once by accidently hitting something at the top of the box. When I did I finally I checked the box for stacking and hit ok. The pictures never did come up on screen side by side. Just one at a time when I swiped them from one separate stage to another. Nothing happened. I am not surprised. Nothing on one person's computer or photoshop ever works or looks the same as the people's equipment doing the tutorial. I am so glad I only bought this dog crap version for one month. I 've always thought these photoshops from Adobe were the worst and waste of money. You have to be a computer scientist just to complete one little simple thing. Every 2 minutes they are changing the positions of the icons, the interface, rearranging every stupid box or location of one thing or another. To the point where half the crap you find under File is now found under Edit and vice versa. Too many steps to get to what you need. Last time I will ever deal with Adobe. It is a worthless piece of hardware that only photographers and other professional computer experts can use. Adobe is not for beginners or people who are not an expert at navigating computer software like Adobe. Once something fails to work as you see on a video, you have no clue what to do in order to get it to work. And help lines are worthless. Too expensive for photo software to be this (complicated). Thank you for your video just the same. Much appreciated. But this software hasn't completed one project I have attempted and I have tried them all step by step for batdom. Simply put, this crap doesn't work. I would advise anyone here who has not bought Adobe and is not an expert to NOT buy it at all. It is too much stuff adjoined to it to be honest for the average non-professional to navigate. Try something cheaper with less bells and whistles that never function like they are supposed to. That is my honest assessment and review of Adobe. IT IS THE WORST and most useless software I have ever purchased.

Thank you for this fine and clear focus stacking tutorial. One quick question if you don't mind. After the images are stacked the file that is created is a tif and is much smaller than the originals were. Are we loosing any clarity or detail (pixel data) with a tif? My canon RAW files can go from 30 GB to less than 2 after focus stacking. Thank you.

My pc used 95% of my 40 GB of ram. I had 37 pictures of flowers that I was making into one photo.

Can I focus stack using Photoshop Elements 2024, rather than "Photoshop"?

ARW files seem to be problematic, as most times Photoshop 2023 shows same picture in each layer. It seems to only load the first picture, and other pictures are loaded as the same picture. So stacking does not work for me in Photoshop 2023 with ARW files, but in 2024 CTRL+J to copy layers don't work as it misaligns layers. I don't know all of this is not an issue in older versions.

Three minutes! You need a faster computer or to try Helicon Focus (it's from Ukraine BTW)' would do this in about 10 seconds on a Ryzen 5 3600 3.9ghz CPU.