for S&G last night, I took 324 individual pictures of a bud with the focusing rail - I was twisting the adjustment screw in close to 1mm increments. that a took about an hour.
I then brought the pictures into Lightroom (20 minutes), and picked one that had a large in-focus area, and sharpened/adjusted lighting etc. then applied those adjustments to all the pictures (30 minutes). Exported them all as .jpegs (an hour). Stacked the .jpeg pictures in Photoshop (20 minutes). Aligned all the images (an hour). I then told Photoshop to create a composite image, using the in-foucus portion of the individual 324 shots. Set it up to do that around midnight and let it run overnight. Woke up this AM and it still was working on that.
being impatient, I stopped the whole process, grabbed 100 pictures from the middle of the 324 photo set and repeated the process. Still took an hour, but here is the result...not too bad.
I think 100 shots will be the sweet spot - will require some math to figure out how long the "focus throw" needs to be, but as a retired engineer that's okay. I do have a calculator, but I lost my slide rule along the way. The abacus is around here someplace just in case...
oo bad.