Review focus stacking autofocus brackets with Affinity Photo, Helicon Focus, Picolay, and Zerene Stacker

[archaeopteryx]

This is a review of four commonly used focus stackers. It’s based on a few years’ experience of applying combinations of Helicon, Picolay, and Zerene to autofocus brackets collected using Panasonic’s 4k post focus.

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[archaeopteryx]

Addendum: Living with Helicon Focus and Combining Stackers
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[retiredfromlife]

Thanks for the very in depth article, i will no doubt come back to this a few times as stacking is somthing i would like to try one day, but my understanding is rather lacking at this stage of how the software works. This is apart from trying to work out how to hand hold a camera to get stacks of insects when i have trouble hand held single shots

 

[Stanga]

A few things to note about Helicon. Version 7 is far better in alignment than 6. I also like the option on the right hand side of the interface where you can enable or disable any loaded image quite easily and run the stack again to see which image exactly is causing a particular error in a stack.
An i7 processor and SSD is preferred when working with large amount of images.

 

[Harvey Melvin Richards]

Very impressive write-up @archaeopteryx .

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[Jrsforums]

Nice write up and examples. It would have been helpful, as a baseline, to include an Adobe PS example.

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[Bushboy]

Interestingly, I bought, affinity, solely, for the focus stacking program.
I did not realise that there were other alternatives. However, I am glad I got it, because it is much more than I bargained for!
Well done on a in depth review Archterex, very thorough. As usual most of it flew over the top of my head. 15,000 frames.... !
300 shot stacks! O M G!

 

[Stanga]

Oddly enough, I got Affinity for it's stacking feature as well... I wanted to take shots of locations in London that are however crawling with people most of the time. I found out that Affinity can easily remove the moving crowd if you have enough base images. I just couldn't get the hang of doing that in any of the other programs I tried.

 

[peterwgallagher]

I heartily recommend Zerene Stacker: not only for the quality of the results (which is most important) but also for the fantastic support Rik Littlefield, the developer, CEO and bottle-washer at Zerene offers. In 2017, Rik spent many hours fixing a Mac problem for me, including making several trial versions to track down an obscure bug. He was successful in the end. I'm still impressed and still grateful.

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[0000]

I'd rate Helicon's handling of blown highlights as slightly more natural looking.

I don't personally find some highlight blooming objectionable, but... I can't help but notice the striking lack of textural detail even aside from highlights in that Helicon pyramids crop...

Thanks for the update!

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[0000]

Here's some crops from the other side of the stem.

Again, it looks to me almost as if the Helicon version was subjected to aggresive denoising of the midtones, compared to the Zerene copy. Mind you, I'm not asserting that this means the Zerene version is "better" for any kind of normal viewing purposes... I just find the difference surprising (I've never actually used Helicon). Interesting stuff.

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[0000]

I don't have a fresh Pinus contorta sample at the moment but, based on my experience viewing stomata through a 10x hand lens, Zerene looks a bit noisy to me. My subjective assessment for the moment is radius 3 or 4 is probably more honest about detail.

That makes sense... I suppose if I ever get around to working with Zerene again, it would make sense to try some different degrees of heavier-handed denoise than I normally would at the RAW processing stage (probably would have already realized that if I did more of this kind of thing).

Another factor is the alignment processes aren't identical, so some difference in pixel level calculations exists

Yeah, this is where I would intuitively expect to see some differences... maybe more than are actually apparent in your comparisons. I guess improvements on all sides tends towards convergence here...

 

[archaeopteryx]

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[0000]

Interesting insights... nice of you to keep up with the comparisons despite seemingly having a pretty good idea which ones work best for your purposes.

To the extent there's gain on existing noise denoise in raw conversion will help but I strongly suspect there's a nontrivial additive component which varies noticeably from stacker to stacker.

Huh... I was laboring under the delusion that the noise was "generated" only by digging up any tiny amount that was latent in the sources... I'll have to look further into that at some point.

So, even though we're the people who'd probably benefit the most from stacking at higher ISOs, we're usually at base ISO or close to it and raw isn't part of our toolchains.

Welp, good to know there's a shadowy corner left to explore if I ever get inspired...

 

[archaeopteryx]

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