Photo Stacking for June Flowers

I did a lot of focus bracketing and stacking in June. Most of the 18 flower images below were taken at a local arboretum and a local botanic garden.  A few were in our yard.  I used mFT camera bodies by Olympus (E-M1) and Panasonic (GX80/85).  Most were taken with the Olympus 60mm macro lens.  Some were taken with the Olympus 12-100mm zoom.  

Both my Olympus and Panasonic cameras have a focus bracketing feature that allows me to focus on the closest part of the flower with the first shot, followed automatically by sequentially further-focused shots.  The beauty of this feature is that this is done with one press of the shutter and at a speed of approximately 10 frames per second.

May's images and post about photo stacking flowers mentioned I had assembled the May images using Zyrene Stacker. In June I instead used photoshop, and I prefer the results it gave me. And of course, for those who already subscribe to Photoshop and Lightroom, there is not the additional expense of buying a plug-in like Zyrene Stacker.

Basically, I find Photoshop does a better job aligning the flowers.  As a result there is rarely any ghosting, something I more than occasionally found using Zyrene Stacker.

Generally, I shot 20 images at a time, starting by focusing on the closest point of the flower.  In Lightroom I viewed each image and deleted any that were focusing further than the farthest point of the flower.  In some cases all 20 images were useable.  In one case, I only used the first seven images.

In all but two of these stacked images I shot wide open at F2.8 (60mm macro) and F4 (12-100 zoom).The two exceptions were at F4 on the macro lens.

Nine more:

With a couple of exceptions I sought hazy or cloudy days.  Light of any kind is good, but diffused light is the best!