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digital Scheimpflug tutorial


Traditional vs. Digital Scheimpflug

There are many reasons to give digital Scheimpflug a try. Foremost is the fact that cameras with fixed lens and film planes are limited to aperture size as the method to control image sharpness. In scenes with significant depth-of-field, it may be impossible to get a small enough aperture to bring everything in to focus. And since apertures smaller than f/16 generally cause loss of image detail, working with tiny apertures is generally not desirable. Digital sensors emphasize out-of-focus elements and loss of detail. Digital Scheimpflug provides a method to achieve sharpness throughout the frame while retaining maximum detail. Because it works with layers, digital Scheimpflug can take advantage of Photoshop's ability to make selections, which offers significant flexibility in determining the in-focus and out-of-focus areas of the image.

Figure 19
Figure 19

The image used throughout this tutorial is a good example of the advantage digital Scheimpflug has over the traditional Scheimpflug, which involves physically moving rigid film or lens planes. Figure 19 again shows the image, this time color-coded and labeled with the exposure (Near, Middle, Far) that was revealed by the digital Scheimpflug masks. It clearly shows that the two sides of the frame are both elements that are near the camera. Tilting or swinging the lens would not have improved the depth-of-focus in this situation. Swinging the front standard on a view camera to improve the focus on one side would necessarily worsen the focus on the other. Moving into the frame, the elements recede vertically from both sides. Tilting would therefore also be ineffective. Doing so to improve the focus on the bottom elements would make focus worse for those on the top.

Digital Scheimpflug easily overcomes the limitation of the rigid film and lens planes that are a part of the camera movements with traditional Scheimpflug. While the exposures do represent rigid planes of focus in the scene itself, the digital Scheimpflug process makes them very plastic by comparison.