Post Focus and Post Depth-of-Field

Today’s Post by Mark Toal

Lately, I’ve become obsessed with a new feature that Panasonic introduced for their Lumix Micro Four-thirds cameras called Post Focus. When the updated firmware is installed on a Lumix GX8, G7 or FZ300 camera it lets you to re-focus an image after you shoot using the cameras touch screen LCD, or later using your computer.

Most modern cameras do a great job autofocusing but sometimes you might want a slightly different focus than the cameras choose. In my case this frequently happens with close ups of subjects such as flowers where I want to emphasize something other than what the camera focused on or I want more of the image to be in focus than the camera originally captured.

As soon as I saw a demo of Post Focus I had a feeling that there had to be more uses for it. Focus stacking was the first thing that came to mind. I recently wrote a blog and made a video about focus stacking using the Post Focus feature. Focus stacking has been around for a while and Post Focus just makes it easier for people like me who don’t like to use tripods or manual focus.

I quickly realized that I could use some of the images from the Post Focus video to increase the depth of field in an image but not bring everything into focus. I could do this in the camera by changing my aperture but using the individual Post Focus images I can precisely control the depth-of-field and still shoot with the lens wide open to get beautiful out of focus backgrounds as you can see in the video below.