zerene focus stacker compared to helicon focus

ZERENE FOCUS STACKER COMPARED TO HELICON FOCUS SOFTWARE

There are many roads that lead to Rome and we can’t easily walk them all to the end, so at least for now I am walking with Zerene Stacker. I checked out (and purchased!) various focus-stacking programs and finally settled on Zerene Stacker as being IMO the best of the lot.

ZERENE FOCUS STACKER COMPARED TO HELICON FOCUS SOFTWARE

Some of the focus-stacking software is amazing at what it can do considering there is no human making real-time on-the-spot decisions when they are needed. That being said, let’s talk a bit about retouching stacked photos. Things change and even I do too, albeit probably more slowly than average. Well, I am all grown up now and habituated to retouching just as I had to learn to enjoy stacking the photos in the first place.

This just shows you how little I understood about the mechanics of focus stacking, like: there is no way to avoid retouching most photos. I did not have the patience and at that time I still felt that if a photo needed retouching then I had done something wrong. Still, retouching stacked photos was not something that I warmed to easily. Of course, the results of focus stacking did grab my attention and ever-so gradually I became addicted and was drawn into the long (and sometimes painful) process of stacking photos. I was a close-up photographer and this focus stacking was just something I was experimenting with and pretty much a nuisance at that. Believe it or not, at the time I felt that focus stacking was already such an almighty inconvenience that I was damned if I would add insult to injury by having to fiddle with the finished stacked photo. If it needed retouching, I just ignored that photo and concentrated on those that were OK. Way back when I was first getting into focus stacking, I refused to retouch, ever.

Zerene focus stacker compared to helicon focus