ghosting with focus merges

[mistergarth]

My camera, a Lumix GX-85, has a nifty feature called "post focus". Basically, it uses the 4K movie mode to make a focus stack; each frame in the little movie clip has a slightly different focal plane. It's possible to do the processing in-camera, but I much prefer doing it in my studio on the big screen with a keyboard and mouse. So, I extract the frames in an app called SnapMotion, and then create the focus merge in AF Photo. Generally, this process works great. I can get wonderful sharpness and depth of field in macro work handheld or with improvised support. BUT, sometimes, there is a little too much motion in the scene. Perhaps the flower is swaying in the breeze, perhaps bugs are crawling around, perhaps my handholding isn't steady enough. The result is ghosting which manifests itself as an odd halo effect or choppy pieces of insect.

When I do HDR exposure merges in Lightroom, there is a setting for "deghost amount" which helps reduce/prevent that problem. I don't see any equivalent setting in AF Photo for focus merges.

Does anybody have suggestions as to how I can deal with this problem? Is there a setting somewhere that I'm missing? When it's just a little halo around the petals, it's a fairly easy cleanup. But sometimes the images are something of a mess.

I've attached an image which shows the problem. There's both the fuzzy halo thing around the petals and some ants that are chopped up.

 

[Callum]

Hi mistergarth,

By any chance could you upload some sample images so I can try some things at my end to see what the best solution might be? I can provide a secure DropBox link if you would rather not post them publicly.

Thanks

C