Nice! I have a godox speedlight for nikon and like it. I use the softbox diffuser that came with it but was thinking about either building or buying a new diffuser for it as well the other day. The remote / wireless transmitter they make is pretty nice as well.
Yeah the amount of settings on these cameras can be a bit overwhelming.
My olympus point and shoot has integrated focus stacking and ya it’s pretty effortless other than needing to use a tripod. I know I’d use that option if my nikon had it, rather than manually doing it via software. I imagine the results will be significantly better on your camera than my point and shoot as well.
I don’t know where your knowledge level is but for me what really helped was starting out using manual mode and just playing around with Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO and seeing how those 3 affect the image. The various auto modes on your camera will adjust them for you but I think it’s helpful to get a feel for them by playing around. Also forcing yourself to use the camera a lot for non-gardening things, and especially with prime or fixed focal length lenses. An example would be trying to take landscape or portrait pictures with a prime-macro lens.
I still have to delve deeper into Darktable and currently am just adjusting levels on the JPG pictures I take, resize, and then upload here. This post from my old thread may help for getting into Darktable / GIMP though if you decide to go that route.
Both GIMP & Darktable are open source and are a decent free alternative to Photoshop & Lightroom. There are a few benefits when it comes to shooting in raw and Darktable is the program you’d use to make adjustments to the raw file. Some camera settings like white balance can be adjusted afterwords in the raw file as opposed to JPEG shooting.
Completely forgot I sent some of those your way, hope you find something good! How are you liking the pinesoul so far?