Focus Stacking With My Brand New Sony A7RV

Of course you need an autofocus lens for automated in camera focus bracketing and some of the best macro lenses are manual only, so don't let the lack of autofocus keep you from focus bracketing.

Focus stacking in Photoshop is rudimentary at best. It's a two step process where the first step, Align Layers actually works quite well, but the whole thing falls apart when it comes to Blend Layers where the typical crappy results are seen.

The easiest stacking software is Helicon but there are a couple or caveats, having done many hundreds of stacking projects. You absolutely have to go into the Preferences and change the defaults in the interpolation options to whatever is the very slowest option. It makes a huge visible difference in the quality of the stacking and slows down the process. You probably won't get those fast stacking times this way but they will be better.

Secondly, you may have to tweak the preferences for how much resizing or rotation the program is allow to do during the stacking process, particularly with lenses that have a high degree of focus breathing as you move from close to further away. And then, for most stacking operations, Mode C seems to provide the best quality.

There are situations where Helicon falls apart - and those are generally when you have a flat, flatly lit surface with little or no detail that's coming toward the lens. Those flat areas can often get weird banding and other artifacts that will need retouching. When those happen, I've found that Zerene Stacker usually handles those areas quite a bit better, but if you don't want to have multiple stacking apps on hand, I always recommend Helicon first.