Stacking workflow

Post date: Jan 28, 2013 6:02:16 PM

Sometimes there are a lot of work involved for only one final photo. In this example I only needed 3 hours to get all of the 353 photos. After the “photoshoot” I connect camera directly to computer and download photos to computer with Lightroom. I don’t use card readers because every one of them died after few downloads (maybe this is computer related). First thing I do in Lightroom is photo tagging. I only use tags for equipment which I used to produce photo and because camera don’t register the aperture used I add that too. In this case the tags were: el-nikkor, 50mm, f/8. In my honest opinion the most boring part of photography is to check all of the photos and delete bad ones (out of focus photos, over or underexposed photos, wrong composition, too shallow depth of field etc.).

I ended up with 195 photos left. All of the selected photos are renamed with this form: TT_YYMMDD_###. I then use stacking option in Lightroom for photos taken from the same perpective.

Lightroom stacks. The best stack will be edited, other stacks will go to archive.

After all of the stacking is done I select best photo based on colors, pose, composition and depth of field. It is better if the stack have many photos. In this particular stack I got lucky because the spider was standing still for very long time (around 30 seconds) and I managed to take 29 frames with various focus points. From now on the hard part begins. I have to select best photos from this big pile and order it so that the photos with focus on front legs of spider are the first and the photos with focus on back of the head of the spider are the last. Each photo is checked for position of focus and the results are written in handy table.

This table always helps me in selecting photos. Strike through numbers are photos not good enough, and Or. is order of final photos, where 1 is first photo and 11 is last photo.

This photo took me 6 hours. Spider was very nervous so I needed around 3 hours for this pretty “model”. 2 hours were reserved for selecting best photos and 1 hour for stacking (Zerene Stacker) and retouching (Zerene Stacker and Photoshop).

Final result