Thanks!
Getting sharp images are not easy, especially in an aquarium where nothing never is truly still. You will have some water movement even with all pumps off from fish and the fact that corals are living things with movable polyps.
In order to do focus stacking at these magnification levels you need more tools than just the camera. You can either use a motor driven stacking machine that automatically more the camera tiny increments forward between each picture or use software that moved the focus ring on your camera automatically between each picture. The latter is what I am using. The trick is to get enough pictures to capture the whole subject without too much overlap. You also want to make sure that you actually have a good overlap throughout the whole final image or you will have out of focus parts that will look bad (I have them on pretty much all the pictures above). I still have not mastered that part. Finally, the aligning and merging of the final images and post processing are all done in Photoshop. This is a very tedious process as you usually end up with a lot of images (some of the ones above were 50+ images before merging). File sizes quickly becomes huge.
Hope this answers your question.
