I just took my first trip to Point Lobos on California’s west coast since I transitioned to digital several years ago. Before that I had always shot with a medium- or large-format camera. With digital tools at my disposal, I decided to produce a photograph using the extended depth-of-field capability of Photoshop CS4.

I selected a relatively small image, with sufficient distance between the rocks in the foreground and the wet glossy plateau on the rock at the back of the image. I made three exposures, each focused differently, and imported the resulting images into Lightroom, which I use as my initial software for all non-montage work (Figure 1).

In Lightroom, I selected the three images, did global corrections on the first one, then synched it with the other two. From Lightroom I went to Edit > Open as Layers in Photoshop. Selecting all three layers, I ran Auto Align then Auto Blend on the three focus layers (Figure 2). I then flattened the layers and saved the file; it was automatically moved into Lightroom. I now had my base image with extended depth of field.