Common orange lichen, 5:1 stack, Heesch

This is a stack at 5x macro of the Common orange lichen. A few "making of" notes:

From this magnification and onwards, things start to look really dirty and messy. Dust, particles, threads everywhere. Depending on the subject, some people prepare their specimens for this reason. The thing I like about this shot is that you can start to see the algae (green), part of the lichen.

The stack is reasonable but does have beginner issues, in particular a few halo effects that are a common result of stacking. It primarily happens due to 2 reasons: the step length was too small (not in this case), or the software fails to accurately detect sharp/soft edges. Its hard or even impossible to avoid halos altogether, but in the meanwhile I've already learned a few things to minimize them.

Finally, a note on sharpness. I usually post my photos in very high resolution. If I didn't crop the photo, it's over 8000 pixels wide. If the shot was decent, you can zoom pretty deeply to inspect additional details in the image. I most certainly can't produce that at 5x macro, zooming digitally into a high res photos basically means you're at 10:1 (combined). At that level, there's way too many optical/movement/noise issues.

In other words, for these types of images, what you're looking at is the usable detail. Zooming deeply into the image won't make you very happy.