The weather is chilly and raining of course, on this fine July day when my new (to me) Z lens arrived in the post. Undeterred, I was determined to experiment with the focus stacking feature that the Z7ii provides with such glass.

I decided to make it really tough, and hastily set up a test on the desk in my study in the dismal light (ISO 25600) with a tricky subject like, oh I don't know, how about the corkscrew coils on this old penknife at about 15cm?

Taking Steve Perry's advice, I pulled the focus back a smidge from the auto-focus point on the shoulder of the first coil, and guesstimated that 50 f/8 exposures at a focus step of 4 would give me a decent test run (it did).

Close up of coils of a corkscrew on a penknife
First (1 of 50) in the stack, just before the shoulder of the first coil in focus f/8.0, 1/30s, ISO 25600

The Z7ii ripped through them in short order and I had my stack images ready, but then I hit a problem. My RAW editor of choice these days is ON1's Photo RAW standalone, but it's limited to how many images it can process in a focus stack (14, I think). I had a look at a couple of dedicated stacking apps (you know who you are) before having a brainwave.

Close up of coils of a corkscrew on a penknife
Last (50 of 50) in the stack, just past the shoulder of the third coil in focus f/8.0, 1/30s, ISO 25600

The other tool in my workflow is Affinity's Photo 2, so I fired it up just to see how many it could process in a focus stack. I can tell you it's at least 50 (fifty) 73MB 8256x5504 images! Woo-hoo! 😄

I ran the first, last and merged images through ON1 Photo RAW's denoise and exported them as PNGs for display here.

Close up of coils of a corkscrew on a penknife
Final merged, stacked image with 3 coils in focus Stacked in Affinity Photo 2, denoised in ON1 Photo RAW

I'm sure I could've used a larger step (5) and less images in the stack, but I'm looking forward to exploring the possibilities out in the wild with this lens in the near future!