StackFocus

Macro photography on a phone is a fight against physics. A macro lens gives you a razor-thin plane of focus — a few millimetres deep — so a single frame is almost never fully sharp. The classic answer is focus stacking: shoot a burst at many focal depths, then blend the sharpest slice of each frame. That used to mean a tripod, a desktop tool, and patience.

StackFocus started as a bet that the whole pipeline could live on the iPhone in your hand — sweep, align, blend, export — with zero computer in the loop.

Handheld macro stacking is hard for two reasons. First, the plane of focus is so thin that you can't hold still enough for a clean sweep. Second, your hands drift and tilt between frames, so the images don't line up — parallax shifts the subject and ruins the blend.

Existing tools split into two camps: powerful desktop software that locks you to a workflow, and subscription apps that offload the actual work to a server. Neither respects that a phone camera is already in your pocket, and that your macro shots shouldn't leave the device.

The first move was to make the capture automatic: StackFocus sweeps focus across the range itself, grabbing frames continuously instead of asking the user to nudge the focus by hand. The second was treating alignment as a first-class problem — every frame is auto-aligned against handheld drift and parallax before blending, so a human hand is good enough.

The hard part was the blend. Naive stacking leaves halos and ghosting wherever edges move between frames; alignment has to be robust enough that the sharpest-pixel blend doesn't smudge fine texture. Several passes were thrown away — early versions aligned too loosely and introduced blur, others too aggressively and created seams.

The win came from separating the problems: align for geometry first, blend for sharpness second, and let the user see the result immediately on-device.

Everything runs on-device: no account, no server round-trip, photos never leave the phone. That rules out heavyweight processing and means the alignment and blending have to fit the iPhone's real-time budget. Solo build, one-time $4.99 unlock instead of a subscription — so the economics have to work without recurring revenue.

A dedicated macro focus-stacking camera that shoots, stacks, edits and exports without a computer — auto sweep, drift-proof alignment, on-device blend.

On-device — no cloud

100%

On-device — no cloud

One-time unlock

$4.99

One-time unlock

Accounts or subscriptions

0

Accounts or subscriptions