To process raw files takes two separate steps.
#Best free focus stacking software plus
Zerene is really user friendly and the settings are really easy to work with, especially with the tutorials but keep in mind this is just my experience and in no way am i an expert when it comes to stacking! If you havn't already, it's well worth checking out the Zerene website and reading over the FAQ and tutorials! Plus there is always a free trail Feel free to ask any questions you may have about it!!įor easy reference: I have copied the text from Zerene's FAQ, concerning RAW files I found the touching up tools in Zerene and Helicon to be almost identical so no real points there. I save all my stacks as 16 bit TIFF's and then export to photoshop for any touch ups that Zerene didn't get and then a final image re-size for forum posts but everything else is handled by Zerene. Having the individual layers and all of photoshop's tools to work with was really nice and incredibly familiar but again the quality of the final image wasn't the same. As for me, I've been using photoshop since the early 2000's.very early 2000's.longer than i'd like to admit actually because it just confirms how damn old i'm getting but even still, i opted for Zerene over photoshop's automated stacking. He's also part of this hobbies community which for me is a big plus and while i've never needed any customer support, i know he would be extremely helpful in helping out. I also like to process my RAW files myself and the guy who made Zerene Stackers has a really good understanding of how RAW files work and explains himself very well for the reasons not to include RAW file support. Granted, sometimes it was a very close call but overall Zerene Stacker, for me, came up the winner. I had multiple data sets, some with only 4 images, some with 30 images and some with lots of different colours going on.
#Best free focus stacking software how to
I don't know all the technical details on how stacking programs work but I understand how to play with settings and spent hours trying every combination of all settings in all programs using the same data and picked Zerene Stacker's results every time. Helicon does have a really nice look to it and ended up being the fastest stacking program but i found the final image output to be less sharp and not as "deep". While I don't have the comparison data anymore to show you, I did some decent testing between Photoshop, Zerene and Helicon and opted for Zerene Stacker. With 32 gig of RAM and a current i7 processor I would think I would have the horsepower needed to run this thing efficiently. So, either I did something wrong with how I ran the program (I just dropped in the files and let it do it's thing) or the program is simply not able to do what I need it to do. At this point, it is still going well after an hour. Well, the thing is Photoshop handled the exact same set of images in a minute or less. In the memory 8 raw images are 8 x 24000000 x 3 x 14 Bit = 8064000000 Bit = 1008000000 Byte =1008 MB = 1 GB This is quite a lot of data to work on, even for a fast computer. Use the right algorithm though, some degrade the image qualty more than others. a 24 megapixel image you could make a 6 megapixel image and save memory and time and get the same quality of result. One would think that from 8 images one would necessarily get a higher resolved image than from 1 image, but this is only the case if you have very finely spaced steps. When I first started with panoramas I downloaded Hugin, but I never really got on with the interface and never seemed to be getting it to do what I wanted with my images.MicroBob wrote:From my limited stacking experience I would say you won't lose any resolution if you downsize the images somewhat before stacking. Tutorial specific for focus stacking (older) & examples: to batch convert the raw files to TIFF without loss of image quality.
Use a free tool like Nikon Capture NX-D, RawTherapee, Darktable, etc. I used it to stitch together a 200MP image in this example, and you can see how it even improved the detail automatically, by stacking various photos in together. It also does a lot of other things, like other types of stacking, panoramas, etc. Hugin is a powerful image merging tool that also does focus stacking, though with TIFF rather than NEF. I think you can do it in PS but I only have elements 9 which I am pretty sure won't focus stack. will ideally work with NEF files (Nikon Raws)? Are there any free programs for Focus Stacking, which.
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