capoty, welcome aboard!
Nice image -- I see that the bar for first-time posts has been raised once again.
It is surprising how much movement we get in these hard corals and they certainly react to the light ( Flash )
Do you need to use flash for your stacked images? Subject movement will usually degrade a stack even if flash has made the individual images sharp. You might be better off to use continuous illumination and just accept some blurring in case of subject movement.
If you're using flash as a way of freezing out vibration caused by camera shutter, then be sure to read up on how to use the camera's capability to use electronic first shutter curtain (EFSC). With EFSC, you should have no trouble getting sharp images with continuous illumination, assuming that the subject is not moving.
Would love to know any thoughts on what we should be looking for regarding stacking issues /noise /sharpness etc.
The stack looks clean to me except for these "closed contour lines" in out-of-focus background:
Best guess is that those are due to pushing the DMap contrast threshold slider too far left, so that the software makes mistakes by trying to infer depth from image content, even in areas where there's not enough sharp detail to do that correctly. The slider should be pushed right until those problematic areas go "black in preview". This is discussed in more detail in the tutorial
"How To Use DMap", linked from the main Tutorials index page at
https://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/d ... rialsindex .
suggestions on how to handle aligning of images that have subject movement would be appreciated.
That's a hard problem and I don't know any good way to do it.
Every focus stacking package that I know assumes that images can be aligned by linear operations on the entire image: shift/scale/rotate. If part of the subject moves with respect to another part, then no attempt is made to introduce nonlinear "warping" transformations to keep the moving parts lined up from frame to frame. (Photoshop will automatically do a bit of nonlinear warping, but it's really restricted to modeling lens distortions, which is commonly needed in side-by-side stitching applications.)
In some cases you might be able to use Stack Selected in combination with retouching to clean up problems caused by subject motion.
I hope this helps!
--Rik
