I photograph landscapes and I often take more images than are required to capture the entire subject in focus.
I delete the frames which are out of focus prior to running the images through Helicon Focus.
I have done some testing and it appears that if I include out of focus images (that should not ...

I am focus stacking in dng and everything seems to be working.
I do have a question why there is a color cast on the final image prior to saving (see screenshot below). When the image is saved back to Lightroom there is no color cast.