I fired off a burst of 11 images at this tree waving its dark red/brown leaves in the breeze, planning on merging them to make a swirling mass of color. That's not exactly what happened.
#1. In Photoshop I ran auto-align and then auto-blend, and the blurriness I expected did not appear. Not awful, but not what I expected.
#2. Somewhat frustrated by the Photoshop results, I dropped all the individual images into Luminar Neo's "Focus Stacking" extension (it seemed like a good idea at the time.) Since the original photographs were handheld at 400mm, which means that none of them were in perfect alignment with any other one, the result felt more like a Jackson Pollock painting than a photograph.
FYI, my up-to-date Neo no longer works as a Photoshop plug-in. I do not seem to be alone with this. Neo technical support denies there is a problem, so I have to use it as a standalone program.
Your second photo reminds me of looking through a thin sheet of ice. Also a hard sugar glaze over candy in a flat sheet. Also a search game in the manner of "Where's Waldo?"
I love your creative thinking, Andrew.
The second has such a surreal effect - I think using his could produce stunning results as leaves/color palettes change (and/or you play with the hues).
Good idea, Andrew! I'm sorry it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. In Photoshop, couldn't you have played with the opacities of each individual layer of the the auto-aligned layers? The second photo is really pretty. I love the colors and the glassy feel it has.
Fascinating. The second one is great.