I only just found out (thanks to an article in the new EOS Magazine) that Photoshop CS4 and CS5 (which I'm now using) can do automated focus stacking, so last night I gave it a go. I took this series of shots back in July 2009, but they were handheld and were very difficult to align manually. I tried a couple of times but was never happy. I don't have dedicated stacking software, but when I saw the article I thought I'd give it a try. You just select all the layers (having imported all the images as separate layers in the same file), then go Edit>Auto Align, then Edit>Auto Merge. Simple! I just did a couple of manual adjustments, one to pick up a sharper part than the program had selected, and the second to deal with an antenna that had moved and caused a bit of ghosting.
The picture shows a pond skater feasting on a large red damselfly that had fallen into the water. Six shots were used, all taken with the 100mm macro in natural light.
