Well.. Focus Stack doesn't work?

[YetAnotherPhotographer]

With the new annoucement made by Affinity I wanted to try again the software (I bought the V1, and didn't use it much, not because I didn't like it but you know how work works and the tools you know are usually the fastest..) so I tried to make a focus stack on an image I'm working on for a specific (art) project. I really want to like the software mainly because scope and some color oriented tools are really good for what I do. 

Unfortunately, no matter how I try to focus stack 2 images I have, I can't find a way to properly merge those 2. 

I first tried "New Stack" but I realized it's more for stacking 2 exact same images, to reduce noise etc. 

So then I tried "Focus Merge", but the result is all blurry except a relatively small portion (the sharpest part of the image). 

The 2 images are very simple, they are not taken with a tripod but it's a very simple stack to make, one has a car in front in focus but not the background, the other one has the background in focus. Photoshop makes a perfect stack in 2 clicks, no edit whatsoever to make. 

Affinity also doesn't show me the stack it makes with the masking of the 2 images, or I don't know where to look. Surprisingly, even the sharpest part of the image is not even as sharp as what Photoshop produces, probably due to the transition between blurred and not blurred pixels. 

The only articles/videos I found on the interweb show how to manually edit some minor ghosting, using the bursh tool and one source image, this kind of stuff. But it won't work in my case since it's more like the stack didn't work and my whole background is blurry (even more than in the image where the background is not in focus, which is odd) with a ton lot of ghosting around the car which will be basically impossible to edit. 

Do you have any tips for me to try? 

(The 2 images are exports from Darktable, with the exact same setting) 

[loukash]

18 minutes ago, YetAnotherPhotographer said:

The only articles/videos I found on the interweb show how to manually edit some minor ghosting, using the bursh tool and one source image, this kind of stuff.

Why not actually start at the source?
affinity.serif.com/learn/photo/desktop

And from there go directly to youtube.com/@AffinityPhotoOfficial/search?query=focus stack

[carl123]

Alternatively, upload the 2 images to the forum so we can see if it's the software at fault or something else

[YetAnotherPhotographer]

@loukash I already did that of course. 

 

Edited March 26 by YetAnotherPhotographer

[YetAnotherPhotographer]

50 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Alternatively, upload the 2 images to the forum so we can see if it's the software at fault or something else

You are right! 

 

Here are the 2 images. Can you download them here in their original format? 

Don't focus on the thumbnail here, they are in Rec2020 profile. 

[YetAnotherPhotographer]

And for reference here is the image I get after stacking them in Affinity Photo V2:

 

[loukash]

22 minutes ago, YetAnotherPhotographer said:

Can you download them here in their original format?

Yes, that's possible:

1. click the preview to open the gallery mode
2. ctrl/rightclick and select "Open image in new tab" (or similar, depending on browser used)
3. to download, drag and drop the image to Finder (on Mac)

24 minutes ago, YetAnotherPhotographer said:

for reference here is the image I get after stacking them in Affinity Photo V2

Yep, I'm getting the same result with Focus Merge.
Not exactly "great". 

Using New Stack and then fine-tune-align and mask manually will probably give better results.

But frankly, I'm no expert on this kind of tasks as I've never had any "real world use" for those two features yet. 
Usually I'm making a lot of use of the Panorama mode which may work in this scenario just as well by simply masking/unmasking those parts I want to show or hide.