I took a series of 20 photos of the eye of a Green lacewing insect. For those who are interested you can download the 20 source images here (its the full res source images, so its a 300MB download): http://www.themicrouniverse.com/20images.zip
I think this is a very good test image since the curvature of the eye presents some alignment challenges.
Zerene stacker has got 2 staking methods, called DMap and PMax.
Image 1 below:
Zerene Stacker using DMap method - Does a nice stacking job
- Does great job at aligning all the source images - notice how the dirty spots form lines in the background as each image is re-aligned - they are out of alignment because of the focus curvature at the different focus points
- The background color blending not so good
Image 2 below:
Zerene Stacker using PMax method - Does a nice stacking job
- Does great job at aligning all the source images
- The background color blending looks better
- Color and contrast seems off
Image 3 below:
Using Photoshop - Not aligned - Does a nice stacking job
- No alignment of source images - see how some of the eye hexagons are miss-aligned
- The background color blending looks much better
Image 4 below:
Using Photoshop - aligned images - Couldn't find an option in Photoshop to align images, however Zerene Stacker allows you to save the aligned images - I used these aligned images to stack in Photoshop
Image 5 below:
Final Image - Cleaned up Image 4 Using Photoshop
Conclusion:
At first glance it would seem that Photoshop did a better job than Zerene Stacker. However, Zerene Stacker has a retouching option, where you can retouch any area on your image, telling it to use a specific source image's detail. I could've fixed the background issue very simply using this.
With this retouching ability, the auto alignment of images and its ease of use - I've convinced myself that Zerene Stacker is the better option.
I must add that I was using Photoshop CS6 and and have no idea how the latest versions of Photoshop will fare.
Hope someone finds this helpful
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