Digital darkroom trick

Digital image manipulation can compensate for many of the practical limitations of photography, including depth of field. As a test of both my new digital SLR and of the concept of blending images of different focal points, I set up the camera about three inches away from the foreground locomotive and made sure I could also see the "horizon." Then I fired off two shots, one focused as closely as possible and the other focused on the most distant background buildings. I also stopped the aperture down as far as it would go to maximize what depth of field I could obtain. Little did I know that the effort of manually blending the two images was unnecessary. But, I was also not surprised that such processing tools existed, because I happen to work in a related field.

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Image specs: The two upper images were taken with a Canon 20D digital SLR. Lighting was available layout light. They were blended together using Corel PhotoPaint version 9 to produce the larger image. In the interest of "full disclosure," I must point out that the two "before" images were processed to exaggerate the blurred portions. When the original high-resolution (2336 x 3504 pixel) images were reduced to 200 x 250 pixels for this page, the blurriness all but disappeared! The larger "after" image is, however, the actual composite of the two original source images.

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