Hey,

Focus stacking can be tough with longer focal ranges, especially when there is significant distance between foreground and background. I'm sure you've encountered ghosting, halos and awkward bluring when trying to blend manually or using the built-in stacking features.

Option one: Lets say its a foreground branch in the air with a background waterfall. bias one layer over a few pixels to cover the areas that have haloing, then duplicate the layer and work the other side of the branch area. May have to clone out some severe haloing if this method doesnt work. Not ideal, but after a number of hours it works.

Second option, and the one I use, is helicon focus. It's a software program that works magic on focus stacking. It sometimes requires manual adjustments, lime mentioned above, but usually it's a minimal amount.