HELICON VS ZERENE STACKER SOFTWARE

And I think that is a serious problem for Helicon. Because I could have all the experience in the world and it is not going to make up for the fact that there are some things this otherwise great program just cannot do. But my lack of experience with Helicon’s retouching is only part of the story. I feel like I know both of these programs very well indeed, though I have to admit I have plenty of work to do in Helicon’s retouching environment. Well that was day one, and I have taken a lot of photographs since then.

HELICON VS ZERENE STACKER SOFTWARE

In fact, I was so surprised on the first shooting day of this project, that when I saw the speed with which Helicon ripped through stacks and saw the quality of the initial few batches of simple stacks, I immediately called my friend Mike, another Zerene guy but several time zones to my left, and yelled down the line, “Mike, Just saw the first few outputs from this Helicon stacking software and it is nothing like what I was expecting.” He responded by muttering something that might have been a friendly “cheerio”, but which sounded more like an unambiguous death threat, before hanging up on me, as he does every time I call at 3AM. This is the kind of healthy competition that keeps everyone on their toes.

That is good for us and it is good for Zerene. Helicon has come a long way since I first tried it out. So, I was surprised but excited to see that there was some serious competition, after all. That was quite some time ago and there weren’t that many people that I knew using anything but Zerene. That was, after all, why I chose Zerene Stacker as my stacking software when it was time for me to get serious about my work. I came into it expecting to find Zerene a better product in every way. Also, I take it from this thread viewtopic.php?t=11223 that you would have to adjust the criteria for output compatibility.This has been a long but enjoyable process. I'm not a programmer and I'm making some assumptions so I could be way off base but isn't the solution to do something akin to split stacks but using the alignment data of the 'master' project? I'm not sure I'm explaining that well. Other than the rather snarky final comment it sounds like he's describing the same thing as the OP. You cannot retouch from the original source images and the substack outputs within the same active project. The reason is because the substack has undergone a different alignment than the original source images and will not “fit” over the baseline retouching target without realignment - which then renders the original input images misaligned.

This is not the case with Helicon - you can run a selected sub stack and produce a new output, but that output becomes part of a different project and cannot be used as a retouching source in the original project. This is the ability to stack a subset of my original images and produce an output that remains in the current project and therefor may be used as a retouching source. It is a tool that is as basic to my retouching workflow as a camera is to my photography. The tool that is absent from the Helicon program is one that may seem trivial and insignificant, or even totally irrelevant if you don’t believe in retouching (in which case this argument will not sway you), but is one that I use in virtually every focus stacked image that I produce. If you want to know is sordid detail how ZS compares to the other popular stacker, Helicon, read my three part essay on the subject, but it boils down to one crucial difference - only ZS has a complete set of retouching tools (at this writing). A word about the other focus stacking programs is called for here.

Helicon vs zerene stacker