no matter what I tried

Sometimes it seems like creating a focus stacked image is simple.  You just take the pictures, pop them into the stacking app of choice (Helicon Focus is mine) and let it do its thang.

The image I'm sharing today shows that it's not always that simple.

I shot sixty images of this green beetle but no matter how many times or different methods I utilised I could not get it to look in any way natural.  Examining the images I shot I could see that they covered every micrometre of the scene in question, but the app just could not stitch them together to give the result I wanted.

I tried three times with three different sets of bracketed images, but in each case I was getting the same poorly stitched together results.

It's a nice enough portrait, but it could have been so much better.

Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mk2, OM System 90mm f3.5 macro
1/500th of a second at f5, ISO 200
handheld
60-shot focus bracket stacked in Helicon Focus

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Here's the last but one of a short series of image montages before "normal" videos resume shortly: