Large DOF digital capture or montage

I have a job photographing snail shells which vary in size down to <1mm across. At the moment I am using a coolpix 995 on a Leica stereo microscope, but gaining adequate dof is difficult at these sorts of magnifications. I just tried out AutoMontage software which appears to do an incredible job of compiling images of a single specimen taken at different focus distances (by adjusting the focus on the microscope), into a single image with huge dof. There are sometimes a few artifacts that need to be removed manually but it is pretty clever.
I had till now been doing something similar by cloning (in PS) the sharply focused parts of a number of images into one final image but it is rather time consuming.
Does anyone know of similar software which could achieve the desired result (AutoMontage is rather expensive)?
Some time ago I heard of an optical/digital system which, I think, took a uniformly out of focus image then used some sort of digital magic to make a sharp image with lots of dof but I can’t remember what it was called. Anyone heard of it?

Cheers all,
Neil.