This is one of your BEST videos. Very clear without getting too techie THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!

Extremely nice to see you upright and looking well. Cheers.

THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! This was the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Bracketing each of the focus areas and blending them! I am so excited to learn this. Seriously thank you. I can’t wait to get out in the field… like this evening. Btw your channel is a favorite and although I’ve never commented, I seriously appreciate what you are sharing… for free. I hope to do a workshop one day.

Nigel thanks for sharing your workflow in the field. I’m wondering why you prefer to capture your focus brackets first, then go back and ‘guess’ where to focus for your other exposure bracket(s). I would have thought you would grab your exposures at each focus.

Watched 7-8 of these. Yours is the easiest. Thank you.

Have just found your page tonight and have binge watched your some videos for the last 3 hours! Great material and super clear and informative info! Thank you Nigel!

I so want elevate my photography up a few levels to create printable photos. Think watching this just shows how much foresight needs to be considered before you press the shutter. Must buy a printer too 😂 Cheers Nigel as alway 💯📸

Hi Nigel. I am following you since years, and ever so often I am blown away by your drone footage. I am a drone pilot and photographer myself. So I think I speak for more people, but please, please, please do a video or course on how you approch your drone videos and pictures. Best wishes and cheers from Austria. BTW if you want awesome mountainscape close to the UK, you have to visit Austria and the alps. Best wishes Andy

A process I didn't even know existed! How neat! Thanks Nigel

Great video Nigel, great information. I think I need to sit with a cup of coffee and try and digest all this information👍 Always learning on this channel. Thank you for sharing 😊

thanks for this treat and fully recognise your sayings in this vlog….

Many thanks fore sharing the focus and exposure blend process. Have a good Sunday!

Thank you so much Nigel! Your photography is inspiring and your videos have helped me tremendously on my photography journey.

Thanks, Nigel! Appreciate the insight into your process and to make it simpler! Hope your back is coming along well! Cheers!

Your generous and informative videos (& lovely calendars as I can attest! 🙂) are a super services. Thank you so much! Have you ever considered capturing your advice in downloadable books with links to the pertinent videos in your catalogue? I'd be a first customer. I ask because you go a bit fast at times and I find myself rewinding and jotting notes. That's a testament to your value and not at all a critique of style BTW.

Thank you Nigel- just what I wanted. Great video

Thank you thank u thank u Nigel.

You are a life saver! I have started documenting art galleries and am always using focus stacking to make sure the whole gallery is crisp and focused, but have struggled with balancing the bright spotlights and deep shadows in the gallery. I think this will be the perfect solution! Thank you :-)

Thank you Nigel. I didn't know that you exposure bracket for focus on both the foreground and background. I appreciate your help.

That was a great tutorial thanks Nigel, very best wishes.

Neat to see it printed, it takes on a different life.

Wonderfu!, I really appreciate you sharing things like this, thank you!

So helpful Nigel and a beautiful shot! Thanks!

Great video and tutorial, thank you Nigel ! 👌📸🤙🏼

Watched it again, especially being in the Field. Takes awhile Nigel but it sunk in......Appreciate your tips they are very helpful.

beautiful vision of a beautiful scene - ty for sharing the what, how, and why.

Was up at 04:30 this morning for a sunrise shot where I knew I'd be doing a bracketed focus stack. I've never focus stacked before, let alone focus stacked and bracketed. I thought the shot was going to be a pano as well, just to make it that bit more difficult but I literally only had 3-4 minutes to capture the image before the sun broke the horizon completely, so just ended up doing a single shot. I knew you had a video on this as I'd watched it before, but it took some finding as I didn't think it was a year ago when I watched it 😖. Anyway, it's just helped me through this mornings panic shot, so thank you for making these videos. 🙃

Nigel, nice to watch one of your videos again, very useful and I will surely implement it soon. Thanks for sharing

i typically use the bracketing feature of the camera. your method is so much more logical. thank you.

Awesome instructional video Nigel. Thank you.

Thanks for a very useful video Nigel; I’ve recently been merging photos exposed for the sky and foreground in PS using luminosity masks, but yours is a simpler process. Things become a little more complicated if you need to eliminate flares by blotting out the sun with your thumb/finger. Perhaps you could do a future video where the sun is in shot and you need to deal with flares as well as focus and exposure blending.

Thanks Nigel. I’ve watched you focus/exposure stack a before and this was the one that stuck 😂👍

Thanks for a nice easy and clear process. I have tried all the wrong ways but this looks really great. Amazing how easy it is when done by an expert.

Thanks Nigel, a SUPER helpful video 😊

Why I didn't thought about the sharpness stack-up before ! Very good reminder, thx Nigel !

Thanks Nigel,appreciate it. great show.

Thank you Nigel. That’s super helpful.

Great tutorial Nigel, really clear and simple

Such a good tutorial, thank you Nigel!

Thanks for a simple and super easy to understand video Nigel! I have been using exposure bracketing and merging to HDR for a while, but focus stacking was on my "to do" list. Your clear and concise video has given me the confidence to tackle this by revealing that it's actually not that complicated. Much appreciated! Until next Sunday.........

Great tutorial Nigel, once again.

Brilliant! Manual is the way to go

Very well explained and a super print to finish with!

Another great video with very useful information. Hope you have a great week and keep up the hard work.

Thank you Nigel! This is very helpful!

Thank you for the quick tutorial! It’s amazing how simple it can be.

Helpful video….thanks Nigel!

This is brilliant, thank you Nigel. So well explained, I want to do similar editing on my own photos. You make everything much easier to follow, than trying to read about it in books!

Thanks for the detailed explanation Nigel! That's a beautiful image. Love the purple heather with that warm side light.

Hi Nigel , went out yesterday with the specific intention of shooting for this technique and have just finished blending and stacking , brilliant ! thanks so much for sharing this .

Cleared up a lot for me. Thanks

Useful video. Thank you..........Been using Squarespace for a year now. Love it

Very helpful. I will surely give it a try. Thank you!

Super helpful. I use small apertures most of the time in my landscape photography so I'm not getting the best out of my lenses. Focus stacking is my next learning goal. Thanks for making it less scary!

Great job. Thanks!

Great video makes it look reasonably simple. One question though how do you deal with movement in part of the scene for example if the grass in the foreground was blowing about.?

Thank's, great tutorial!!!

I really enjoyed this video Nigel, I found it very intuitive and your workflow looks a lot easier than the way that I photo stack. I was up on the Roaches yesterday morning for some sunrise images. I'm going to have a go on your method of photo stacking when I get my images onto the computer. Hope you back keeps improving and allowing you to get about more easily. Thank you.

Awesome Nigel! Thanks ever so much! You must have read my mind. This is the exact topic I've been wondering how to do this well, and ive been trying to find an easy to understand explanation of how. Now I have one. Cheers! 👍

HDR first! I've been pondering that for a couple of days. Thanks.

Thank you for your help!

Thank you very much helps me so much !

Thank you for this very informative tutorial. It is so useful.

A really usefull tutorial, thank you Nigel! Perfectly explained! This helps me and is the answer for some questions I had.

Great help! Thanks

Pretty good explanation even including DR blending. So now it is up to me to go out and try it out 😄

Good stuff - thanks for sharing!

Thank you, about to go and try this. 👍👏

So helpful video, thanks a lot!

Great video thank you! So helpful to see the process. Going to give it a try.

Good instructions!

This is OK, but if you have Helicon Focus it will focus stack a set of unprocessed raw files and output a .dng file. Stack one set for your sky, one set for the foreground. You then have two focus stacked raw files, one for highlights and one for shadows. You just open these in Lightroom or ACR and merge to HDR in the usual way, giving you a single raw file all ready to process as normal. At no point do you have to process any of the intermediate files or faff about with with .tif files or layers.. It’s a really quick, easy workflow. Helicon also does a much better job focus stacking as it uses depth mapping.

Thank you so much for explaining that! As always, fantastic work. I really need to start doing it that way. I'm losing a lot of my shadows because I don't focus stack and exposure blend. I normally just make sure the highlights aren't blown out.

Nicely done

Thank you! Was a great video. I allready know about image stacking but you do this way easier than i would done it . i also doesnt really like to go high F stop .

Very interesting, thankyou!!

man this is great thank you

Thank you very much

Thanks. I sometimes try an easiar method but isnt quite sure if its good enough. I just focus at the foreground with a suitable exposure and then the background with a exposure for the sky...then blend those two images in photoshop. It usually works.

What has seemed interesting to me, is that the question which has been effectively answered in the video, is a question which I had a great interest in, which I posted about two days prior in dpreview. You’re not in the wrong here, but it’s an interesting coincidence. This is meant as a positive comment. Stacking photos has mesmerized me personally, mainly because it is, to some extent, challenging. Challenges are perhaps what modern technology and software might want to eliminate gradually, but as for the process of trying to create a photo, it is for me, something that can bring excitement. I’m not sure why that is, but maybe it might be associated with my time playing video games, training myself to become more proficient and tasking my mind to become better in some way/ways!

You've done really nice try which I gave up to trying to both HDR and focus stacking. I was afraid of kind of goast from the many stacking, but I'll try next. Thank you.

Thanks for the tutorial! I would recommend using a more paper color look alike on the printing tab in LR, so you can preview slightly better the final print... have a nice day!

Hi Nigel, I do a similar thing when I do HDR mosaics, I've done them with 16+ separate views (components), each has a -2EV, 0EV +2EV exposure bracket, I do the HDR merged of all of them, the first edit I sync with the rest of the HDR merged photos, then mosaic everything together. I makes a monstrously large mosaic, but it's fun to do. I've done them for large 3x2 mosaics, as well as 40x4 aspect ratio mosaic along a straight stretch of river with snowmobiles racing along the frozen river in winter. Motion of vehicles is always really tricky when exposure bracketing with the ghosting effect, the same goes for trees moving on a windy day.

When the camera has automatic exposure bracketing it is easy to focus in 1 spot, take 3 different exposures, focus on the 2nd spot, take 3 different exposures with that focus point, etc. My problem with focus stacking however is with wind. Very often when I want to take a photo where I'll need to focus-stack, what I have in the foreground is blowing in the wind and a more distant part of the scene is visible behind it, which needs a different focus. So this plant in the foreground is in different places in different shots and I have some parts of the image where nothing's sharp.

As you, Nigel, focus on "post" that is greatly appreciated. Something that is easily overlooked in the forest of Nikon menu functions that sometimes feel to cumulatively explode, I suggest to try as follows. (1) set the camera's exposure metering to "highlight-weighted" (2) set Auto Bracketing to AE bracketing, Number of shots to +3F and Increment to 2. What (1) does is compare the EV measured by each of the 46 million or so photosites. This is business as usual - what the camera does with each frame it builds in the eVF, when shooting an image or for each frame in recording video. And the camera builds a histogram from that continuous "scan" that visualizes how many photosites measure total blackness, or total whiteness relative to exposure and dynamic range. Knowing from this which (where in the frame) the brightest metering photosites are, the camera now sets exposure for that photosite to become "white" - that is a digital integer number of 16,384 in a 14 bits depth raw file. (Yes, I know, because of the Bayer architecture, the camera can only measure red, green and blue - not white, but that's a deep detail.) Place the sun directly in the image and the camera will ignore it as "too bright". It's a pity that there are no options with the "highlight-weighted" metering because having tiny spots of exceptional brightness - like the twinkles in backlit rippled water surface of a lake in your landscape - may be far apart and we may not need these to have gradation conserved between and in them. I use exposure compensation to manage this. Which is to say that tiny highlights can force exposure down. Consequently these shots look between 2 and 4 stops under-exposed in Lightroom. Well, the good news is that there is zero detail loss in the highlights. The consequence may be that the blackest areas in these shots lose detail or become grainy, or both. Even with 15 EV dynamic range in a Z 7ii or Z 9, you don't want to lose any quality. BTW, how grainy the details might become is much more a matter of your post processing software doing a good job than your camera doing bad. So now (2) the Auto Bracketing is set to 3 shots that takes one at the measured reference exposure and takes two additional shots that overexpose by two stops relative to each other. Note the + in the +3F that forces the bracketing into overexposure (i.e. detail recovery in the blacks) only. The opposite is -3F but we do not want that as highlight metering never wants/needs under-exposure. The increment of 2 EV is gut feeling based on experience with highlight weighted metering. (Leave the + or - sign with the increment away and the camera brackets both over and under in one sequence. And we do not want that either in "highlight weighted" metering.)

Thank you Nigel, as usual another great tutorial. I am going to use your technique on an upcoming shoot. I thought the medium format guys were forced to do focus stacking for max foreground to background sharpness. It looks like we as FF shooters could benefit from focus stacking too. I shoot with a Sony A7RIV and with the insane resolution of the camera, focus stacking is a must as every imperfections shows up on the screen and on prints.

Super tutorial. Not very good with PhotoShop, but you made it look easy to stack photos. Love the workflow and will give it a try.

you made that look so simple

Hi Nigel. Great video tutorial and very helpful with good easy instructions on focus stacking and blending images. A great follow on from your webinar last week. On the point of the webinar I was late in attending and they mentioned they would provide a recording of the webinar. Do you know when that will be available.

Really simply helpful Do you have the tutorials of this kind of photo post processing for purchase? Thanks

Thanks for the video! Mark Denny has a similar video on this as well but I think he does things a bit backwards. He'll do the stacking of each exposure first then blend them as HDR afterwards

You're the best man! I asked a question in an older video just today. I'll ask here since newer video and you may not go back and read comments on older videos. I'm a beginner photo taker (I won't say photographer) when you are focusing on foreground, mid, and infinity, you have camera on tripod. I would you recon you don't move your camera to focus on those areas, so how? Do you just change the focal points on the camera itself? Or do you actually tilt camera to focus on that area? I think I answered my own question but just to be sure... thanks so much Nigel I'm a huge fan relatively recent fan and your videos are definitely an inspiration and a great tool for me. Be well

Suuuper useful video! Thank You very much Nigel! It is so good to see You are back in the business! P.S. The bowl underneath Your screen should be filled with candies

Good job Nigel, you achieve a very good balance in your images. I think landscape photographers need to be mindful that sharpness and detail are a function of distance throughout the scene, there should be different levels throughout the image, having everything equally sharp from the foreground to the extreme distance is a mistake we see quite often!

Hey Nigel, I really enjoy your channel and always learn something. I do a lot of Panos. I auto bracket for 3-5 images and use a gimbal and nodal rail just to get a jump on the stitching. With LR Classic, I grab all of the images and let LRC do the auto HDR Pano. If I add focus stacking I do it again and then take the DNGs into PS for focus stacking. Wouldn't it be great if LRC offered HDR-PANO-FOCUS? We would then have a DNG ready-to-post process. It could happen.😎🤙

Nice shot bro ....📸📸📸

Hey, I remember there was a time when people won't use the HDR and rather do the exposure blending in photoshop. The reason was that the colours would look rellay strange on HDR. Did lightroom change that? The colours on your photo looks pretty good for me!

Great video Nigel. What about a comparison between 24-70/f4 vs. 24-120/f4?

Very interesting and informative video, than you. I didn't see how you pasted the settings from the first blended image to the second. Is there a keyboard shortcut?

Thanks again Nigel for a great tutorial. I have been using HDR Merge in Lightroom and using Auto Settings and getting frustrated with the over saturation of what it thought I wanted to see. I nearly always shoot hand held in the hills so focus stacking has been near impossible, will have to get my tripod out and give that a go too. Cheers and hope the back recovery is coming along well.