Tripod-Free Focus Stacking in Photoshop: Real Limits, Real Results

You can get a sharp foreground and a sharp horizon without living at f/16, and without turning your hike into a tripod march. This video shows how focus stacking in Photoshop can clean up the usual weak spot in wide landscape shots, the near stuff that never lands in focus.

Coming to you from Brent Hall, this hands-on video starts in the field with a simple point that gets skipped: focus stacking begins with where you stand, not what you click. Hall walks you through a scene built around agave and a distant rock, then changes his distance to the foreground to show how the number of frames climbs fast as you move closer. He shoots handheld on a Sony Vario-Tessar T* FE 16-35mm f/4 ZA OSS, and he is blunt that a tripod is helpful but not mandatory if you understand the tradeoffs. You see his focus points step from near detail to midground to background, and you also see him react to the light dropping, which is the real constraint in a lot of landscapes. He uses a sunstar setup at f/16 and about 1/200 s, and he treats it like a choice, not a rule.

The part worth stealing is how practical the capture routine is when you’re doing more than one stack in the same spot. Hall suggests making a clear “break” between sequences by taking a quick frame of something dark, like your hand, so later you can spot exactly where each stack starts and ends without hunting through similar thumbnails. He also flags the subject problem that trips people up: busy foregrounds plus wind are where handheld stacks fall apart, especially with spiky plants, fine branches, and anything that shifts between frames. That’s also where a tripod stops being optional and starts being the difference between a clean blend and a masking headache. He keeps the advice grounded in what actually moves in the frame, not in abstract “rules” about doing things the “right” way. He even calls out that you can shoot multiple exposures of the same composition as the light changes, instead of treating one stack as the only attempt you get.

Back in the studio, the workflow is fast, and it’s the part most people overthink. Hall sorts his frames, does quick global adjustments in Camera Raw, leans on Adobe’s AI denoise when he ends up at ISO 8,000, then loads the frames as layers. The key steps are Auto-Align Layers first, then Auto-Blend Layers with “Stack Images,” which is where Photoshop builds masks for each frame. He shows what happens when one frame is “wonky” enough to ruin the blend, and he drops it rather than trying to force it, which is a smarter habit than pretending every stack must use every image. After blending, he merges layers and deals with the messy edge artifacts from alignment in the simplest way: a small crop instead of a long detour into content-aware fixes. He also tees up an advanced move he only partially shows: combining focus stacking with an exposure stack for highlights, and he hints at how easily that can spiral if you don’t keep exposures consistent across focus changes. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Hall.