It's a nice shot.
I'd be interested how focus-blending works for you going forward, as you use it in more situations. Based on my testing I think the technology still has some serious limitations. First there's the problem of movement in the frame (wind, etc). Another big problem is artifacts from the blending process.
Your scene here has a receding plane of focus (the same type of layout that is well suited to lens-tilt). From what I've seen, focus blending starts to fall apart when you have overlapping planes that you want to keep sharp (tree or other object in the foreground sticking up so that it overlaps with the distant background).
Does your 55micro have any focus-breathing, or does the FOV remain constant as you change focus? That's another thing the blending software doesn't handle very well in my experience.
I'm guessing Photoshop will eventually solve most of these limitations, probably around CS10 or so.
FWIW I've attached some crops from the lower left of the original, 50% pixel reduction, 60% quality. It shows the three focus planes that affect that area, the rightmost panel is the Helicon processed focus stack. These were all shot at f11 with a 55mm lens on a 21mp full frame.
Interesting how little depth of field there is in terms of pixel-level sharpness. You have to be focused exactly on the subject to get something truly sharp. BTW the Lightroom Beta raw engine does wonderful things with diffraction correction, on the 55mm lens f11 and now looks as good as f8 used to, and even f16 is highly usable.
Helicon automatically fixes breathing by scaling. I think it scales up the more distant focus planes to match the scale of the closest. Scaling will always introduce quality issues, but Helicon handles it extremely well and I feel it's worth it for this kind of work. Must remember to crop in the viewfinder based on the slightly zoomed-in closest focus position.
Yes very close objects superimposed over very distant objects will result in a halo. Halos can be corrected with a specialized rubber stamp tool that lets you freely copy from any plane to the result image with the scaling adjusted, but it's tedious. The user interface offers two parameter sliders that can be adjusted to find the best compromise in halo situations.
The stamp also works well on wind generated artifacts between branches and sky which are easy fix.
However for subtly incremental focus planes on grasses and such, no halos appear. And for the most part looking through openings in foliage to slightly more distance foliage works out fine.
Focus stacking opens all kinds of landscape possibilities. After 5 years of meticulously avoiding foreground objects closer than 20 feet it feels very liberating to finally be able to make that kind of shot.
[attachment=21672:Tondreau...blend_01.jpg]
