Focus bracketing with Open Camera

Open Camera 1.44 introduces a new bracketing photo mode, for focus bracketing. (You need to have Settings/"Use Camera2 API" enabled for this photo mode to show.)

This is useful in situations where it is not possible to have all parts of a scene in focus. Focus bracketing mode can be used to take a burst of photos, each with a different focus distance (between two ranges you can control with sliders):

(Click the images for higher resolution; note that the image is scaled down from the original to reduce size.)

The above shows 3 images from a burst of 6 that I took with Open Camera. The close-up grass is in focus in the first image; the text on the bottle becomes in focus in the middle image; and the background is in focus in the last image.

You'll need to use third party Focus Stacking software to combine these into a single image. See here for a list of some applications. As an example, I put the 6 images into Picolay, to produce the following:

(Again the image is scaled down from the original to reduce size.)

It's far from perfect - to be fair to Picolay, focus stacking is a challenging problem due to the different lens distortion effects in each image. Other settings or software might be able to do better.

[Anonymous]

camera 2 api option not showing

[Mark]

If it's not available, it means the phone doesn't support manual controls I'm afraid (or at least, not for third party applications).

[Anonymous]

How do you control the number of bracketed images?

[Mark]

When in focus bracketing mode, it's on the popup menu (three dots icon), "Number of photos".

[Anonymous]

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[Nightflame]

Is is possible to implement Shutter Speed Bracketting like you find on Shutter Priority Mode in cameras?

[Anonymous]

Hi,
Thank you for the explanation.
But what's the difference between source distance and target distance in the focus bracketing?