Some fuchsia bits shots. This is what the halloween fuchsia was really for . All focus stacked using zerene stacker.

Brian v.

Wow, these are simply excellent!! So sharp and clean, can't see any artifacts besides the top left corner in the second shot. There's no way you can achieve this level of details, sharpness and DOF at such a high magnification without focus stacking. I really should try to learn more about it.

How do you find the Zerene stacker compared to others like Helicon Focus or CombineZP Brian? Faster? More intuitive to use? Better alignment?

n0b0 wrote:
Wow, these are simply excellent!! So sharp and clean, can't see any artifacts besides the top left corner in the second shot. There's no way you can achieve this level of details, sharpness and DOF at such a high magnification without focus stacking. I really should try to learn more about it.

How do you find the Zerene stacker compared to others like Helicon Focus or CombineZP Brian? Faster? More intuitive to use? Better alignment?

Thanks for the comments n0b0- your eyes are too sharp - didn't notice that in #2

I've really not tried Helicon for ages but I preferred Combinez5 over it then. Zerene just seems to be better with most of the problems I had with the combine series. It's auto aligning is much better but the most important factor for me is it is much better at recognising and keeping lower contrast detail. It was actually shots like these where the combine series would actually leave out a lot of the anther textures. Think the user interface is much nicer and user intuitive with zerene than either of them. Having said all that I still fairly frequently stack pics by hand just in CS2.

Brian v.

Have you ever noticed that it's easier for you find little flaws in other's photos than in your own? It's like that for me, very depressing.

Anyway, what I don't like about the CombineZx is that they change the contrast or do something else to the image. The result looks somewhat different to the original photo. It would've been fine if they actually improve the photo but more often than not, they make it look slightly worse.

Well, thanks for the info Brian. I must say I am VERY surprised to see how clean and crisp these stacks are. Of course the kudos goes to you as well for being the skilled operator.

n0b0 wrote:
Have you ever noticed that it's easier for you find little flaws in other's photos than in your own? It's like that for me, very depressing.

Anyway, what I don't like about the CombineZx is that they change the contrast or do something else to the image. The result looks somewhat different to the original photo. It would've been fine if they actually improve the photo but more often than not, they make it look slightly worse.

Well, thanks for the info Brian. I must say I am VERY surprised to see how clean and crisp these stacks are. Of course the kudos goes to you as well for being the skilled operator.
N0bo - I actually modified the stack macros when I was using the combine series to stop it sharpening and doing contrast changes. Zerene has quite a few user setup settings where you can change parameters used in the stack.
Brian V.