Focus Stacked Gerbera Daisy

[DigitalScape]

This image of a Gerbera daisy is composed of three separate images with different focus points.  I stacked them together in Photoshop and then built masks for each layer to show only the in focus portion of each layer.  The result is a very deep DOF image.
  

180mm, 1/250 second, stacked focus

[motleypixel]

Very nice...how did you stack it?

[DigitalScape]

I took several images of the flower changing only the focus point - moving it from the foreground to the background.  Since macro lenses have very narrow DOF, the difference between focus points was about 1 inch on this flower.  I then brought each of the images into the RAW converter -- setting the same white balance, black point, etc for the images (all images the same settings).  Then I loaded each image into Photoshop - using the load layers command. 
 
Next step is to align the images - Photoshop (CS5) has a command/tool for this as well - under the edit menu (Edit > Auto-Align).  And then you create the masks for each layer that shows only the in-focus regions of each layer.  Photoshop has a tool for this as well - Edit >  Auto-Blend.  I did not like the results of the auto-blend, so I ended up making my own masks.  This is the time consuming part of the process.

Once you have the masks, then you flatten the layers and continue with your normal processing work flow.