Guide

Focus stacking in Lightroom

Lightroom cannot merge a focus stack. Not Lightroom Classic, not the cloud version, not the mobile app. It merges HDR and panoramas; focus is not on the list, and nothing in Develop changes that. Here are the two routes that exist.

Route 1 — the Photoshop round-trip

If you have the Photography plan, select the frames in Lightroom Classic, right-click, Edit In → Open as Layers in Photoshop, then Edit → Auto-Align Layers and Edit → Auto-Blend Layers → Stack Images. The result comes back into Lightroom as a TIFF beside the frames. The full steps and the halo problem are on the Photoshop page. Lightroom (cloud) has no Open-as-Layers, so this route is Classic only.

Route 2 — export the frames and stack them in your browser

  1. Develop the frames as you like — but apply the same settings to all of them (sync the settings), because a frame with different exposure or white balance shows as a patch in the merge.
  2. Select the frames, File → Export, JPEG, quality 90 or more, full size, sRGB.
  3. Drop the exported frames on the stacker. It aligns them, merges them and shows the result at 100 %; download the JPEG, PNG or 16-bit TIFF and import it back into Lightroom.

This route needs no Photoshop and no install, works from the cloud version and from Lightroom mobile's exports too, and the frames stay on your computer throughout.

Stack the RAW files, or the developed frames?

The stacker on this site reads RAW directly — DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2 and PEF — and merges the frames in linear light with the camera's as-shot white balance and its colour matrix; an automatic exposure and the sRGB curve are applied once, at export, so the 16-bit TIFF it hands back is a display-referred file with more precision than a JPEG, not undeveloped sensor data. It is the right choice when you would rather the stacker see the sensor's full range than your developed look. Stacking developed frames is the right choice when your look is already made in Lightroom: the choices you make in Develop (exposure, white balance, lens corrections) should be identical across every frame, and the easiest way to guarantee that is to make them once, sync, and export as 16-bit TIFF in sRGB — the stacker reads that too, and does not manage colour, so a ProPhoto or Adobe RGB export would shift.