Spiderwort Trio

John,
I don't have much experience with focus stacking, so this may be a lesson for me in what is normal. One of the things that caused me to reject many of my attempts was an uneven sharpness. I see some of that here at the center bottom and the center top. Just above the hair that is sitting above a petal, there is good sharpness and all of sudden it is OOF a little above that area and a little to the right of that area. And on the bottom, that area goes into an OOF area rather abruptly as well. In stacks of mine that I have given up on, that was the primary reason. Worse, and especially frustrating in Photoshop, some of the stack images had that area sharp and looking good, but the end result pushed it into being OOF. Even if I tried to remove some images from the stack (or add additional images in) I couldn't fix those spots. I attributed that to me just not knowing how to properly overlap the sharpness in the images when taken or the stacking software capabilities not being very good. While it seemed to be better for certain stacks, Helicon Focus had similar issues. And, sometimes a stack attempt will just magically work and have consistent sharpness across the entire frame. I haven't composed any stacks yet this season because of how frustrating it was last year. Viewing your image definitely makes me consider if I should have expected to see that behavior and it makes me wonder how in the heck anyone stacks 100+ images without having that artifact.

Regards,

Steven

Excellent stacked detail, nice grouping, pretty colors.

Hi

You have the blooms looking prominent and although I can relate to Steven's comment in regards to stacking in general, I not sure that there is a work around to fix this; but I no expert


All the best
Matthew

Regardless of the details, John,
Congrats on a striking image.  In my book, the stacking helped you accentuate the yellow stamens, standing out from the brilliant blue background of the petals, in the various angles presented by the flowers.  Very nice!

Very fine detail, and the purple / green combination is always a pleasing one.
Nice work!
Sandy

Thanks for the comments everyone! I agree stacking does have its issue and I do not due it often, but I wanted the busy BG to be OOF but the stamens and petals sharp! Stoping down anymore would bring out the BG! So at times stacking is the only alternative!