finished photo. The lack of finish led to larger and larger stacks but
also to more and more artifacts and complications. There is no
such thing as a free lunch.
Now with the entrance of limited panoramas into my work I have
been forced to rethink focus stacking as the prime solution,
especially long stacks. Perhaps using panos and a short stack may
produce better images.
Three-shot panoramas with no stacking work pretty well if the
subject is more or less flat and you are using a higher aperture like
f/8 or f/11. Then it picks up enough DOF to reveal sharpness.
However, it might be better if there was some light focus stacking,
like making sure to focus on the highest things sticking up, then a
couple more layers going in evenly.
Effectively these kind of panoramas have allowed me to add on to
the right and left sides of this image more of the subject, all in good
detail. Looking at one-third of a shot with the CV-125 would lose the
effect. Pulling back with the CV-125 and shooting horizontal would
be better, but would also take away from the effect.
Anyway this is what I am experimenting with these days,
approximating what perhaps a medium-format camera might
produce.
Problems with focus stacking macros in my experience depend
upon how you chose your subject. If the subject is mostly flat and
parallel to the plane of the camera sensor there are no big
problems. If you want to catch a leaf close to the lens, a flower
some distance beyond that, and some background leaves in the
way back, there are usually problems.
Where objects in the foreground overlap the backgrounds are the
perhaps the most problematic. The near object has a blurry
background (good bokeh) but the background itself is more or less
in focus. Where the near object overlaps the background the two
backgrounds (near and far) can never mix. This leaves a halo or
ghost along the edge of the near object for the obvious reason that
the two backgrounds (one blurred and the other in focus) have to
meet somewhere and that meeting can’t be nice.
By hand retouching you can try to paint over the area near the edge
of the near object and in Photoshop you can use the Clone Tool to
paint in the sharp background right up to the edges... in some