#Helicon focus alternatives free#

But depending on your subject and the number of images stacked, it may suffice if you don't do a lot of focus stacking, especially considering the price of Helicon and Zerene. In my tests of stacking insects with Photoshop, it generated considerably more artifacts than either of the above two products, and retouching them was more tedious.

#Helicon focus alternatives free#

But I don't think you will go too far wrong with either of them, and the 30 day free trials are useful in seeing what works best for you. If I had my druthers, I would combine some of the features of each into a new product. Their Retouching modes are somewhat different, and I think different people may find one to be more intuitive than the other. I find the artifacts it generates are usually less serious and usually easier for me to fix in Retouching mode. I decided that for insects, my primary stacking subject, I like Zerene a little more. I've compared Helicon and Zerene, and to me it's hard to say that one is better than the other. Helicon's integration with Helicon Remote (also available for Tablets) may also be a benefit.īoth programs support automatic focus rails, like the StackShot. with Lightroom, HeliconFocus is able to Raw convert, stack, and output the result as DGN file, which might be a benefit (although I personally do not use conversions to DNG). The algorithms used for stacking are quite similar between ZS and HF.įor those on an Adobe-centric workflow, e.g.

That's why he developed his own stacker, trying to optimize the process for 'deep' stacks with many slices, as are common at those magnifications (DOF per slice is minimal).

I do know that the author of Zerene, Rik Littlefield, has a lot (40+ years) of experience with stacking images of microscopic and macroscopic subject matter. I have not compared the memory use between HF and ZS, nor have I methodically timed the stacking operation, but they seem comparable. I've processed stacks of 100+ images (21 MP each) with Helicon Focus, so that would seem to be not a big issue with HF either.