Stacked focus for maximum depth of field

This is another image in a series I am doing on natural farm foods. The theme for this one was late summer fruits. My stylist and I visited the farmers market in the morning searching for fresh, but natural looking produce that looked like it came straight from the farm.

The depth of this still life set up was 28" front to back. We set up a ruler off camera and marked 1" intervals. I refocused the Nikon D810 28 times, once every inch, from front to back. The lens was a 60mm Nikon macro set to f/5.6. From having done these setups before, I have found that f/5.6 seems to work best.

Click here to download a high res version of this image. 

All 28 16-bit RAW files are treated similarly in Adobe Camera Raw and processed to 16-bit tif files to preserve the maximum color depth. The we run the 28 images through Helicon Focus to combine them in to one photo comprised of the sharpest part of each of the 28 exposures. The process doesn't always work the first time around and the software settings have to be tweaked several times to find the right combination of settings. I redid this one over ten times before I got it the way I liked it.

To give the scene the look of a painting done by an "Old Master" , I used a soft window light very much the way it would have lit for a painting.

I provided a link to a high res version of this file below the image. I did reduce the size of the full file because it was so large it would have taken a lot of time and space handling it. The version here is still large enough to give an idea of how these stacked images look when finished.