An exercise to see how good a result I could achieve in focus stacking some images, hand-held without a tripod.
The technique chosen using Auto ISO, with Aperture Priority set at f22, at a fixed 64mm focal length was to use Auto-Focus and half-depress the shutter to focus on immediate foreground, then move focus point, half-depress again move back to frame and fully depress the shutter to get the five shots (above) to work from.
It was clear that two of the images produced the closest framing …
… so these were chosen and cropped to the right-hand side of the frame.
Then having chosen those two images in LrC – Library > Photo > Edit in… > Open as Layers in Ps was selected.
Over in Ps the two layers were selected and Edit > Auto-Align Layers …; then Edit > Auto-Blend Layers …; and finally File > Save as … were chosen which then returned the image to LrC as a TIFF file – remembering to save the image as a 8-bit flattened TIFF to reduce the filesize.
Lastly in LrC, I chose Library > Convert photo to DNG … [remembering to uncheck “Only convert Raw files”, and probably check “Delete originals after successful conversion” (again to save space)].
The end result …
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