Focus Merge (stacking) in Affinity Photo 2

Part 2 of a series for Amateur Photographer both in print and on YouTube.

Focus merge, or focus bracketing, might sound like a bit of a specialised, technical activity undertaken only by macro experts, but actually it’s (a) a lot easier to do than it sounds and (b) rather more useful than you might imagine.

It tackles a real issue with close-up photography – restricted depth of field. Even at a small lens aperture, you won’t have enough depth of field to keep the whole of your subject sharp. Small subjects have all the three-dimensional depth of larger ones, but at ultra-close focusing distances depth of field, or near-to-far-sharpness, becomes very shallow.

The first step is to shoot a series of focus-bracketed shots of your subject. Done manually, this is a tedious and time-consuming thing. However, many higher-end cameras now have focus bracketing built in, so all you have to do is find the right setting on the camera and it will do it for you.

The second step is to merge these separate images into one, and while some cameras can do this internally, some won’t. In any event, it’s easy to get excellent results with Affinity Photo’s Focus Merge feature, and this tutorial explains how it works.