What Is Macro & Focus Stacking?
The plain-language entry point: what macro actually means, why depth of field collapses at high magnification, and how focus stacking rebuilds it — no prior background assumed.
Read note →Technical notes
Common Problems in Focus Stacking
Practical articles developed from repeated high-magnification capture, failure analysis and workflow refinement. Each note explains an optical or mechanical limitation encountered in real specimen work, why it occurs, and how it is mitigated in practice.
Haze & Halos
Why defocused foreground structures contaminate sharp regions—and why stacking software cannot reconstruct detail that was never recorded cleanly.
Read note →Subject & Camera Movement
How small physical shifts become large sensor-plane displacements and produce doubling, ghosting and unresolved transitions.
Read note →Magnification Breathing
Understanding apparent scale changes across a stack and the demands they place on alignment and composite integrity.
Read note →Vibration & Frame Blur
Why vibration is the least visible and least repairable artifact in deep stacks, where it comes from, and the control hierarchy that prevents it.
Read note →Rail Step Size & Depth of Field
How to choose step size from 2.5× to 10×: depth-of-field collapse with magnification, the 80 percent overlap rule, and worked step values for real configurations.
Read note →Macro Focus Stacking vs. Microscope Z-Stacking
Two optical paths to the same goal: finite-conjugate lenses versus infinity-corrected objectives, free-standing living specimens versus mounted preparations, and when each tool is the right one.
Read note →PMax vs DMap
The same source frames rendered twice: where PMax turns haze into texture that was never there, where DMap loses genuine fine detail, and how to choose between them.
Read note →