Wow! What can you tell us about these hand-held focus stacking shots??? Until fairly recently I had never heard of people being able to do focus stacking on shots that were not tripod-mounted. So, what's the story? Has the software become that much better at aligning shots that are not in perfect register?
I'm not sure I can tell you much....I've honestly only been doing it for about 3-4 days. Here's a list of things I notice about it...keep in mind I've never focus stacked via tripod so I can't compare.
1. I shoot anywhere from 10-30 shots of one position and choose 2-3 shots where the fly didn't move and the focus is on various parts.
2. I am very careful to not change my position as I don't want to change the angle of the shot since that would mess up the alignment.
3. I don't worry about composition at all...I just try to get the insect near the same part of the frame each shot (usually center).
4. When I stack, I stack using the align option first then I combine with the "Do Stack" option (using CombineZP)
5. I crop the shot for composition after they are stacked. The borders usually get stretched and distorted after the stack due to the frames not matching...I crop these sections out to focus on the insect.
6. I do any final editing back in CaptureNX2 (on the final jpeg) I actually do any further editing including the crop of the stacked image in NX2.
That's how I do it. I'm not sure if it's the normal method, but it seems to be working well for me so far.
Oh and thanks to all three of you for your kind comments.
