Focus Stacking, final thoughts

In my youth, my first real job out of college was at the weekly newspaper in the notorious biker town of Sturgis, SD. My title was Reporter/Photographer/Sports Editor, and I had the good fortune to learn from the real Photographer at the paper, Richard Creed. I brought in some basketball photos one time that I thought were good. He took one look at them and said, "Not sharp." What do you mean, not sharp... oh, now I see it. From that moment on, I could not unsee an unsharp photo. We didn't have autofocus 45 years ago, but even now it is quite possible to snap a fuzzy image. I am guilty of occasionally posting images on my web site that I know are just the tiniest bit fuzzy. They are useful because they tell a story. Most people don't notice, but I know. They are not sharp.

It's the same with focus stacking. Once you see that halo around a succulent leaf in a Photoshop stack, you can't unsee it. Which brought me to the past few days when I went through the process of selecting a focus stacking program for macro photography, and settled on Zerene Stacker. Here is why. The first image shows Photoshop's attempt at stacking 12 images of a little succulent that is only 1/4" across. The second image highlights four problem areas where Photoshop couldn't find the proper focus. There are at least four other problem areas that I did not highlight. The final image is Zerene's attempt. Although there are retouching functions within Zerene, I did not use them. All I did to the image was run it through Photoshop's Raw Filter to adjust color and contrast, which I do with every image that I post. In my opinion, the difference is astounding.

One deficiency of Zerene compared to the other programs I tried is it does not work directly with CR3 (RAW) files. To process 16-bit (rather than 8-bit JPG) the CR3 has to be converted to TIF. My Photoshop subscription includes both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom, and Zerene Prosumer edition has a plugin for Lightroom Classic that converts CR3 on the fly. But I HATE the Lightrooms! I have been doing my own image file management for 25 years and their system is overly restrictive compared to the way I'm used to. I don't need batch processing, I can find old files that I am looking for quickly enough, and my system doesn't crash or get a corrupt index every couple of days. Maybe if I had been using them all along I would think differently, but I have tried the Lightrooms and I HATE them.

I use a different, less intrusive Adobe product to convert from CR3 to 16-bit TIF, Adobe Bridge. Then I import the TIF files into Zerene, run both stacking methods (PMax and DMap), and decide which image is better. There is a retouching function within Zerene to handle stubborn halos. I played around with it yesterday, but I didn't see the need to use it on any of the images I did today. PMax is usually (but not always) either better or the same as DMap for the types of images I feed into them.

Even though I have no interest in using the Lightroom plugin, I plan on getting the Zerene Stacker Prosumer edition for metadata preservation. There also are a number of other functions that I haven't explored yet but may find useful. Maybe I do have some hot pixels and a mask would help with the trailing that I've seen on some images. As I investigate this on the interweb, I see the amount of effort some photographers go to for extreme closeup images of insects, for example. All I want is images of my little plants with the metadata.

Photoshop is a powerful program, but a lot of niche programs exist to address deficiencies within Photoshop. Another one that I use is StarStaX, which stacks nighttime images for star trails. Unlike focus stacking, Photoshop does an adequate job of star stacking, but it is just so SLOW that it is easier to use StarStaX. Other examples are PTGui (panoramas), Luminar Neo (sky relacement and portrait enhancement), Krita (for digital artists), and Rebelle 8 (painting). Someone sees a niche and fills it, that's what innovation and free enterprise look like.