[LRflex] Focus stacking... with freeware.
- From: David Young <dsy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: LRflex <leicareflex@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 14:19:57 -0700
Yes, I know, PhotoShop is the best way to do focus stacking. But, I don't have
PS, and I'm too cheap to buy it! So, freeware is the place to start. (If
nothing in freeware does the job, I'll look at lower cost focus-stacking
programs.)
My first effort was with Hugin, the rather excellent, free, panorama program.
They claim they can "fuse" several images to do focus stacking. However, I was
MOST Unimpressed, as "fusing" changed the perspective, and seemed to join all
the out-of-focus bits of the images. Rating: 1 our of 10.
Picolay has a very nice, graphic interface, and is very simple and fast to use.
Results were fair, but with a lot of odd artifacts from the merging process.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
Combine ZM is an older bit of freeware (2008) but does a credible job. Much
slower to work, but much better results. I think it will do better, with
better source images, but, as I said, this is a first attempt, with some rather
quick and dirty shots.
Combine ZM worked the best of the bunch, but yielded some odd "wings" to the
image, at least on this try. However, some quick croping and few tweaks gave a
reasonable result. Rating: 6 out of 10.
The link shows the two extremes of the 5 images used in each trial, and then
the results.
http://www.furnfeather.net/StackTest/First_try.html
Comments, critcism, suggestions for improvement all appreciated.
David.
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