automating focus stacks from lightroom

[Pat Kilgore]

Operating System

1. Windows 10

I need to focus stack 157 stacks in LrC. I´ve been doing them one at a time. But the commands are the same every time.Send to photoshop layers, then align, then merge, then flatten then save. Any way to automate that on a group of stacks in LR?

 

[Gnits]

1 Any reason not to use the built in photo merge / hdr tools built into LrC. That is my current go to method. Resultant flat file returned to LrC catalog.
2. If I was doing a lot of this via Photoshop.. then I would create an action and probably create a desktop action shortcut, so I could drop the files of interest onto this action. I forget the name for this.

 

[clee01l]

I found Zerene Stacker https://www.zerenesystems.com/ to produce the most consistent result for focus stacks. I prefer it over manually doing it in Photoshop. It does a very clean job of finding the in focus portions of each image. I begin using the most basic conversion to RGB in Lightroom Classic. When applied as an external editor, Temporary TIFFs are created in working storage, the result stacked image file is returned to Lightroom. From there I can apply further edits if I desire.
There are several mapping options in Zerene Stacker and tutorials provided.

I'm sure someone has probably developed a focus stacking script for Photoshop, but Zerene Stacker achieves the same or better automatically without the need to invoke Photoshop or generating intermediate files that need to be managed by Classic.