.... As I shoot with Olympus bodies and lenses which all support in-camera focus stacking handheld and tripod, I don't need to follow Stewart Wood's technique. I don't use Lightroom either but I appreciate you posting the video - Thanks.
Re Affinity's Merge (focus stacking), I made the mistake of hitting 'Save' rather than 'Export'! And can't find where it has saved to so I can delete it - It didn't save back to Capture One alongside its source. It also destructively converted one of my ORF RAW files into a TIF < Necessary to work on surely but not destructively !?
I have yet to learn how to load several images at once from Capture One into Affinity for merging.
I normally shoot Canon, both APS-C and FF. We had a speaker at the club talking about macro and he was extolling the virtues of Olympus focus stacking. I decided the camera he was using was too expensive, but I liked the Pen F and that did focus bracketing, but required an external prog to do the actual blending. I bought the Pen f and the 60mm macro lens, just for macro work. As ever, I discovered there's more to it than meets the eye, hence my frustration.
I'm not sure where Affinity stores it's saved files by default.
If I "Save" in Affinity it opens a dialog which allows me to select where I'm going to save.
I have a separate folder for my Affinity files, otherwise I put the exported files back into my image file directory, next to the original raw. I normally export as a 16-bit TIFF if I intend to do any further work on them, otherwise I export as a jpeg,
Affinity saves in its own format (.afphoto) so you'll probably need to do a search for your saved file.
Not sure about the destructive edit - I've never had that, but I always make sure I work on a copy.
Opening files for stacking in Affinity.
If you select "File" in Affinity you get a drop-down menu, one of the items is "New Focus Merge..." If you hit that a new dialog opens which allows you to select the files you want to blend.
Once you've selected the files you want to blend (they can be raw, tiff or jpeg) you just hit "OK" and it does it's thing. I had some files that produced artifacts when merged in On1, but they were perfect in Affinity without any extra work..