My attempt at a "simple" focus stack.
Placed planter at edge of pool, using Canon 5DMkII, Canon 50/1.0L, and smallest Kenko tube, 12mm?
Kinda hard, this is my "manual blending".
I tried CS6, had a much harder time using it's masks, finally did it on my own.
Shrug, not that great, not really knowing what it should be, other than each bloom in focus?



textured, shrug...

A very pleasing image, of its kind, but far off what you would be hoping for,

Harold

Rather like #1 but it does have a lot of OOF haloing around the petals - almost having an orton effect look.

One thing to remember if you are doing this manually is the shots taken with the focus at the near point of the subject result in in focus parts that are actually smaller than the same part taken when the focus is at the far point. This means you actually have to change the sizes of the photographs to match them properly.
Hope that makes sense.
They do not change much but it's enough to give you halos etc. If I take a sequence of shots for stacking with overlapping focus points ( ie the DOF bands overlap) then I seem to to need to change the size of the next photo by about 1% and this is of course incremental. So if I have 5 shots in a stack and I choose the middle shot as my base shot onto which I will copy parts of the other shots. Then if the first shot is the one with the focus at the subject part nearest the camera and the last shot is the part furthest from the camera, then I resize the DPI from 300 as follows to resize the photos
focus stacking software automatically does this resizing for you and I know you can get CS6 to do it for you.

306, 303, 300,297, 294

Brian V.

LordV:
Thanks for the information, and your explanation!
Sounds hard.
I will try this some more after reading about this.
Might as well try the trial Zerene download also, see what that does differently.

like the first one.

Tutorial on how to do it automatically with CS6 here http://digital-photography-school.com/forum/tutorials/150808-focus-stacking-photoshop-cs5.html
Brian v.

I just tried Zerene Stacker trial.
From just messing around with it, I already like it!
Seems like a huge time saver, and I don't know what I'm really doing yet.
Pretty cool to me.
Seems, it would only get better with reading and using.
I think I might purchase this for my toolbox.

Zerene with different texture:

Seems my manual layered stack blend is sharper, though with more halos.
I need to test Zerene more...

Ouch!
That looks garish on this monitor at werke!
This should teach me, once and for all, to NOT try and perform PP on the laptop.
I will HAVE to re-work this.

buggz2k wrote:
Zerene with different texture: