Tilt and Shift and focal point

[KevinCarter]

David;
have you tested Focal Point and have you tested the TS lens?
With TS lens, I got it mainly for cool effect of shooting people and having face in focus and legs out etc. No interest in buildings.
How good is Focal point compared to the lens for that?

[Johan_Elzenga]

I wonder if Focal Point does anything I cannot already do using the Lens Blur filter with an alpha channel...

[Dennis_Vied]

Just off hand, I'd say that if you wanted to use Focal Point to make a selection of an area to have in focus, you'd have to start with an image that is entirely in focus throughout. The problem, in most cases, might be in ACHIEVING that image that is in focus throughout. For that, you might need a T/S lens to start with, so I'm thinking you're not going to be able to substitute Focal Point for a T/S lens, if that is your aim, but it might be able to give you certain effects that a T/S lens would do, and if that's your aim, then it might suffice.

Or, as the old saying goes, TANSTAAFL. (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch).

As Johan suggests, it may just be a target specific type of Blur filter.

[ArtKuntz]

I read about another way to achieve focus throughout the plane of the picture. I read about it on George Barr's blog (Behind the lens). I haven't tried the technique myself. George takes a series of shot using manual focus. Each shot the manual focus is adjusted to a different point. He takes many shots like this. He uses software called Helicon Focus that looks at all the photos and merges all the infocus part of the images into a final output and supposedly you have a picture that has everything in the picture in focus. Not sure that this is what you are after but it is pretty cool technique. Not sure how much the Helicon software costs.

[Richard Dickins]

I think Photoshop CS4 can do that as well now, I remember seeing a video about it the other week.