#ZERENE STACKER VS PHOTOSHOP FREE#

I have compared Zerene with Olympus Workspace and Olympus in camera stacking, by stacking the same bracketed images with all 3. Try them both to find out which interface you like the best and to decide if their output is worth the purchase price.

#ZERENE STACKER VS PHOTOSHOP FREE#

You can try both programmes for free, as each offer a free 30 day trial. The personal edition of Zerene is currently $89USD for a lifetime licence and the lite version of Helicon is $115USD. The advantage of the Helicon approach is a simpler workflow.īoth programmes come in personal, enthusiast, and commercial variants with Zerene currently slightly cheaper in each version. The advantage of the Zerene approach is that it leaves raw conversion algorithms (and their updating) to the specialists. Zerene's philosophy is to let the user use an external raw editor (Lightroom, Capture One, etc.) to convert raw files to 16bit TIFF files which are then imported into Zerene to be stacked. One of the major differences in workflows is the way they handle raw files. Helicon has a more user friendly interface. These images are then imported into a photo-editor and blended/merged together. one image that focuses on the foreground and another that focuses on the background. It also has a more user-friendly interface. The end results from either programme will be indistinguishable but their interfaces and workflow are different. We’ll come back to the exact step-by-step guide to focus stacking in a bit but the main idea of the technique is to capture two or more images with different focal points i.e. Zerene Stacker is better than Helicon Focus because it produces sharper images with less noise. Both do a very good job of stacking and offer the ability to edit the stacked images to correct any small stacking errors.

There are two major specialist stacking programs, Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus.

Zerene stacker vs photoshop