POLL Stacking: What App Are You Using?

[Andrea B.]

My recent in-camera stacking experiment with the S1R didn't work out too well. So I thought I would put the raw sequence into an app to see if things improved. Long ago I had both Helicon and Zerene but they have both expired. So I'm looking to either renew one of those or try something else.

 

Let us know what you are using for stacking. Any comments, either pro or con, are welcomed.

 

This is a one choice poll, so is you are using more than one stacking app, please select only the one you think is "best".

[Andy Perrin]

I’ve only ever tried with Photoshop. 

[Andrea B.]

Andy, so does PS work well for stacking? Or at least well enough?

[Andy Perrin]

For a handful of pictures, it worked adequately. I’ve not done a whole lot of stacking but I used it with the TriWave due to very small depth of field in macro and it was fine. Those images are very low resolution though. 

[enricosavazzi]

Focus stacking is a problem, rather than the solution to a problem. It is simple to explain it in general terms: select the in-focus parts from each image in a stack, then superpose all these in-focus parts into a single image. Unfortunately, how to achieve this goal is a problem with no exact solution, and each stacking algorithm has its strength and weaknesses, and performs better or worse with different subjects and different combinations of settings.

 

I only have some extensive experience with Zerene, and I like it because I use it mostly in photomacrography, which is one of the applications it was developed for (microscopy is another). My impression is that both Helicon and Photoshop are designed mostly for larger subjects than Zerene. Photoshop is probably the least sophisticated of the three in terms of choices and settings.

 

Then there are other differences than just the results. For example, Helicon uses the GPU for floating-point calculations, while Zerene, as far as I can see, only runs calculations on the CPU. Thus, Helicon can be extremely fast on a PC with a modern graphic card and a not-too-large stack.

[dancingcat]

I've used in-camera stacking in an Olympus EM-1mkii, Zerene, Helicon, and Pshop.  The Oly in-camera stacked output is generally acceptable for me, unless the occasional gremlin intrudes and puts halos around high-contrast areas.  That effect does not seem to be reproducible though, sometimes the gremlin appears and sometimes it doesn't.  Have to do science on it eventually.  I'm using Zerene because the look and feel is better on my M1 iMac, but that's just a personal preference for cleaner user interfaces.  I know folks who swear by Helicon for landscapes, and swear by Zerene for macro, so the choice may come down to subject matter.

 

 

[Andrea B.]

• Zerene... mostly in photomacrography, which is one of the applications it was developed for (microscopy is another). My impression is that both Helicon and Photoshop are designed mostly for larger subjects than Zerene.
   
• I know folks who swear by Helicon for landscapes, and swear by Zyrene for macro

Aha! There is some useful info for me. I had not heard this about Zerene being better for close-ups.

[dancingcat]

Helicon seems to have developed a lot of trinkets and doodads for Nikon/Canon/PC landscape photographers, so maybe that's how that preference may have come about.  Zerene seems to put their development efforts on the stacks themselves. 

 

[dabateman]

For stacking there are lots of options. 

I bought Zerene last black Friday,  but sadly still haven't gotten around to use it. I have been too busy with work. 

Affinity photo also does stacking and its not bad. But I never used photoshop.  

I had played around with the free stacking software, Picolay in the past. You have to watch the videos to understand how to use it.

http://www.picolay.de/

 

[Yves W]

I have been using Helicon focus for years after comparison testing

[KaJashey]

I've really liked Affinity Photo for stacking. I would batch process the raws to tiff with bridge and photoshop as affinity doesn't batch settings onto raws. Clean up when needed following their tutorials and was that pretty straight forward as long as you keep the sources window open.

 

I was using an m1 air and doing 30 image stacks just fine. People more knowledgable complain it bogs down with more and that's the difference between affinity and something like helicon. 

 

[Yves W]

Helicon Focus processes RAW including RAF (Fuji) and outputs in DNG. It's convenient for the WB and it's fast.