Experimenting with cinema techniques: Split Focus (Patreon)

Since my computer's giving me fits with this commission I'm working on, I thought I'd take a break and post a test in duplicating a cinema technique called Deep Focus, or Split Focus.

 In the real world, if you want to get something in both the foreground and the background in focus, you use a special lens called a split-field diopter. It's a lens with two different thicknesses, so half focuses on what's close to the camera and the other half focuses on what's further away. It was a lot more common in the 70s and 80s, but probably the director that uses it the most nowadays is Quentin Tarantino, like this scene in Pulp Fiction:

Daz doesn't have a camera setting to automatically mimic this. so you have two options. The first is to turn off depth of field so everything is in focus:

But then everything starts to look fake and you can get distracted by things in the extreme background. The best solution I've found is to shoot each character in focus:

And then merge the two in Photoshop: