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I am starting to play around with focus stacknig and I see there are two techniques: firstly you can adjust the focus point using the focus ring on the lens; or you can mount the camera on a focus rail and move it incrementally.
With the rail technique, will the image not be blurred by the different image size as you move the camera away? You may not be moving it much but when using something like a 50mm lens plus extension tubes the focus distance can be so short that even 5mm can be a significant fraction of the focus distance. Or is it a case of working within limitations?
As you adjust the distance you will change the frame of the shot, which is why you need to ensure that your start point (furthest away) has lagspace either side of the frame to allow for the cropping that will occur once you've reached the final frame.
The software itself that you use for stacking will take care of this problem well and even upscales and does all kinds of funky things to get the shots to line up (you can do it all manually but you'll be doing it for ages to get a result).
I've never used the change of focus technique and can only vouch for the plate method: Linky
Looking back in Bridge, the picture used 32 images taken [I think] 1 or 1.5 mm apart to give a depth of field of either 3 or 4.5cm. I forget how many turns [pitch] of the screw/mm my Manfrotto plate is. The above image took me about an hour to capture - moving very deliberately at each shot - ensuring I didn't kick a tripod leg [don't ask].
The freeware I used was called CombineZM but I haven't tried it lately on my 64 bit machine - but is still on my 32 bit machine as a backup should I ever get interested again. The author was pretty good at ironing bugs and updates came out around monthly.
Processing time was less than 10 minutes for the 32 images on a PC about 3 years ago. Auto alignment [reducing the size of the images taken at the closer points] worked flawlessly.
Forget doing it manually, I know a Photoshop reviewer/beta tester who did it for years manually and says that the auto methods are far superior in 1% of the time
I've used the same freeware option of CombineZM and now ZP and it worked really well for focus stacking. As an interesting point though focus stacking software is a little like noise reduciton/sharpening and many other processes in that there isn't one market leader, nor one that is by far and above better than the rest.
What you do have is a series of programs which each perform well, but which will outperform the others on select series of shots (you can't predict this pattern and even if you could shooting to meet the requirement would be very hard to impossible). So I do encourage serious stacking fans to try out the other software options and to add them to the setup - for your average shot with noise or sharpening the different program gains are small - but for focus stacking it can be a big difference - furthermore the time investment in getting the shots in the first place makes it worth it to run tricky series of stacks through the different software options to get the best out
Those interested might find this comparison test done by LordV (if you don't know him you do know 
) of interest:
Helicon vs Zerene
Read the comments at the start as well since he does report that Helicon also failed where Zerene worked with a different shot - again showing that there isn't really one "best" option
Quote: That's a fantastic image Simon.
It's a technique I have never tried and you have whetted my appetite.
Thanks for that.
To clarify for others who may be wondering - the reason for the 1mm/1.5mm advancement of the focus plate is because the depth of field of each shot was only 1.5mm/2mm - so I needed 32 x 'slices' of the flower to be in focus from front to back to give me a composite image of a fully in focus flower
HTH
Simon
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