I've finally had success with focus stacking!

Inspired by the focus stacking assistant, I wrote a Python program using pyptp that does something similar with a Canon EOS tethered to a Linux PC. (I intend to release this in a bit, but it's very much "under construction" code at this time)

I then aligned the images in hugin and stitched with enblend.

There's still some tinkering to do with tunable parameters, but it looks pretty good! In the thumbnail you can see that all of the table cloth is in focus; view the medium or large versions to see more detail.

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Fused Image
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Typical input image