Finally........... A focus bracketed shot stitched in Photoshop.

I spent most of the afternoon playing around with the focus bracketing facility on my camera. It can take anything up to 999 shots for one press of the shutter at a speed of 11 frames per second. I already knew that 999 would be way too many but I had to experiment to find the optimum number for this iris. When I was with the Olympus trainer last week he said you should take a few more than you think you need and then check them out to see which ones you want to use for the stack. I started with 49 (not sure why) but most of these were focussed well beyond the flower. After a few goes with different numbers of shots and different step widths I found 15 shots that I thought might be worth blending together.

The next step was to work out how to use the Photoshop program I downloaded yesterday (I signed up to Adobe Creative Cloud). A bit of Googling and YouTubing gave me an idea of where to start. It was quite simple once I'd found out the steps. This image is the result of stacking the 15 images together.

If you compare it to yesterday's 'in camera' focus stack it is better in terms of being sharp from front to back I think. I used a white background rather than black just to make a change from yesterday's image.

I think I've still got lots left to learn but I've been pleased with results so far.