[toni-a]

Appealing, it's appealing... For instance, when you deal with flowers and you want to have a sharp subject with a well blurred background, either you have to trade off with aperture (full open means excellent background, but most flowers won't be fully in the DoF; stopping down enough to have the DoF covering the whole flower makes the bokeh worse) or you really need to find a subject with very strong physical separation from the background (with some species, it's just impossible).


With focus stacking, instead, you can shoot several photos at or near maximum aperture, moving each time the DoF from the closest parts of the flower to the farthest. Then a software will merge them, picking the sharpest parts from each shot.


I think you need the tripod. While other kinds of image stacking work without a tripod (e.g. sticking panoramas or HDR), as they are capable to pre-align the various shots before merging them, I think that this attempt is unlikely to work fine with focus stacking, because there are a few sharp parts that the various shots have in common and the algorithm can use as reference points. At least this is my very very limited experience so far.


I think that Adobe Creative Suite has support for focus stacking - that is, for post-processing shots taken with this approach.


Since I'm a lazy guy, I don't want to do anything outside Lightroom. I found a plugin named LR/Enfuse that is capable to do the job (it can do various kinds of merging, including HDR - BTW, it offers an HDR that in some cases produces results "more natural" than the embedded LR support). The problem is that is very "raw" from the user interface point of view, in the sense that you need to set a quantity of numeric parameters that need to be precisely tuned for a good result. There's a manual, but as usual it's a matter of experience. So far I don't have the experience to produce anything good, but I hope sooner or later I'll learn it.


OTOH, some cameras have focus stacking support built-in. This means that they also take charge of shifting the focus ring at each shot, which makes the thing much faster. Apart from the fact that faster is better, in some cases it might be also fundamental, if the subject moves (e.g. flowers in the breeze; and insects, as I've seen people using focus stacking with them).

You know how it can ne done in PhotoShop?