Cost of zerene focus stacker software#
Cost of zerene focus stacker trial#

Cost of zerene focus stacker trial#

It takes a lot of trial and error to judge which of these is the most appropriate and which setting to use. There are few controls over the appearance and outcome of the final stack and Pmax is largely an automated process.ĭmap has a contrast threshold control which controls how much information for each frame to combine to the final stack. Such a technique is known as substacking or slabbing and clarifies the final image considerably, especially in cases of overlapping hairs. Doing substacks is a way to prevent contamination of your final stack by the by too many out of focus areas, especially from parts of the image that are relatively far away from this substack. Or sometimes it's more appropriate to stack Pmaps, depending on the subject matter. I find that I get the best out of Dmap by doing Dmap substacks and combining them with Pmax. Dmap is the harder to use of the two but gives a smoother, more subtle outcome, whereas Pmax is the mode that people invariably start out with.

Zerene Stacker has a couple of focus stack blending modes called Pmax & Dmap which perform different blends.

Cost of zerene focus stacker software#

This ability, together with retouching actually makes Zerene faster to use than other packages, where you have to combine different software to achieve the same result. For example I typically run 20-30 versions of the same stack with different settings overnight, giving me the luxury of choosing the best out of a range the next morning. The inbuilt batch functionality is a good way to make a computer do a lot of the work for you, especially running a set of stacks at different contrast threshold settings unattended overnight to be able to combine the best. Stacks typically take anywhere from 2-24 hrs to combine, after which there's always also stack post-processing to do. Zerene is a hard little worker, but combining a few hundred images into a stack just isn't a fast process. Zerene Stacker: macro stacking software of choice. Alternatively, start at focus stack preparation, work your way through shooting the stack, stack your images and finally perform the necessary focus stack post processing. To understand this, start at the focus stacking overview of .uk. Zerene Stacker, the leader in extreme macro software, has a deep workflow. Zerene allows you to combine a large number of images at different focus points and stitch them together, compensating for the minutely small focus planes that any individual extreme macro shots have. Zerene Stacker is a great package if focus stacking is your bag.