Photo Editing Focus stacking, ON1 and other editor programs

[HegeStensland]

In light of the editor program poll, I felt the need to make a new topic on focus stacking. I haven't completly chosen what program I want to go for yet. I only know that it has to have focus stacking and be easy to work with. A thread on which editor programs includes it and how it is working would be really helpfull! Other advantages with the editor program is welcome as well (as long as it has focus stacking).

My choice so far is ON1 photo raw 2021. My input on ON1 is that I think the focus stacking works quite good, but I lack experiences, so I can't really compare it to other programs yet. Working with different layers is also easy on ON1, but I use that part mostly on the landscapes photos... It is easy to regret steps you took earlier in the process and it comes with a sorting your photos adding as well. Finding and comparing photos, so you can choose if you want to keep one or more of photos that are look-a-likes.

I hope my input will help others and hope others have some quick input on other programs with focus stacking

 

[Helix_2648]

Makes sense to start a new topic for this as this is really interesting on the one hand but complex on the other. The decision for the best software solution for you should be based on several factors and you should ask yourself what you need and what you want to pay for it.

I don't know ON1 and to be honest, I never have heared it before, Therefor I cannot give any recommendations to it.

What I know so far is Helicon Focus (which I'm using), Photoshop, Zerene Stacker and CombineZP.

Photoshop
I think, that nearly everyone knows it and most of us uses it for their photos. It's maybe not the easiest and for sure not the cheapest solution (especially since Adobe has started this awful subscription payment), but you can use it for focus stacking as well.

The software provides a feature to load a stack of pictures to align and analyse it. Photoshop will create a layer with an automatic generated mask which includes just the sharp areas of the respective picture. That works fine as long as you don't have complex stacks with dozens of layers because each manual correction is (from my point of view) awful because you can only use the individual masks for this.

You can find several tutorials about it like this one here:


Helicon Focus
Unlike to other solution like Photoshop Helicon Focus can only do one thing and that's focus stacking. But this is what it does really good.
But why? That's because Helicon provides not only one method to render a stack but three different. Method A is a way to render a stack with special fixed parameters to get a smooth and soft result which might look sometimes to blurry. Method B is much more charper but you might get unwanted artefacts in the background. Both can cause halos if you've overlapping items from front to back. But that's why there is method C. It renders the stack with nearly no visible halos but you'll get a picture with really high contrast and other artefact.

So my workflow includes all three methods. I render my stack three times and start a second instance to render these three pictures again. With that I can use the advantages of all three methods in one picture. Method A for a smotth and blurry background, B for the overall details and C to correct only halos and some other unwanted blurry spots.

It's unfortunately not the cheapest solution but it supports RAW and TIFF files which is very important from my point of view and it provides a good retouchng module. And it provides a very good gpu / hardware acceleration and is therefor very fast!

Zerene Stacker
This software can also only be used for focus stacking and it's even more expensive than Helicon Focus. I'm not familiar withthe possibilities but it provides TIFF support as well and some different settings to render the stack. I've read a lot of articles and comments about it and most of the users uses only P-MAX Standard modus. Not sure about the (dis-)advantages of the other ones.

What I know is, that Zerene Stacker is much slower than Helicon Focus and doesn't provide a hardware / gpu support.

CombineZP
This software has phased out since many years but it's still available. Not sure is there a version above 1.0 available. It provides only the basic functions and doesn't support TIFF files. So it's not really an option if you want to work with it seriously.

 

[HegeStensland]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge Helix!! I think I am at on1 level still, but if I get deeper into focus stacking I might have to try Helicon Focus! It sounds really great!