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MFDB + Zerene Stacker

Well I spent the entire morning and a couple of hours last night, trying to get to grips with Zerene. I had tried focus stacking before and frankly hated doing it. Eventually though comes a scene or requirement that needs it so I bit the bullet.

I'm starting this thread to help us share information on Zerene. I'll post shortly with my experience from yesterday and share some of the things I was not able to resolve.
 
Information on how to use Zerene is here and here.

So using a Linhof Techno and an IQ160. Obviously this setup is far from typical. Unsurprisingly out of the box settings were terrible with massive halos around everything. The stack was shot at ISO100, so there's a little noise in the dark background.

It seems no matter what I do, Zerene cannot tell what is OOF background and what is detail I want to keep.

PMax deals well with large blocks of detailed areas, but I get halos like this:


DMax is giving me something like this:


Going to the extreme, I had radius of 0, smoothing of 1 and contrast of 98 (ish), this was a step too far and ended up with detail being lost:
 
I've now bumped up the luminance noise reduction, as COne does a fantastic job of maintaining details. I also increased the contrast slightly and re-processed all the files. The sharpening is quite mild and just lifts the details a little. There's no clarity which itself can cause halos.

DMap settings are now set the radius to 2 and smoothing to 1. I have to use a contrast setting was still up at 92, which according to the ZS website means I'm telling it to ignore detail in the actual detail areas. It seems to work ok, although there are still a lot of halos. Sorry I didn't grab a screen shot of how much black was showing, but the image basically looked like a find-edges in PS. Anynow the results are that all the detail areas are fine, so it's a question of roaming around using ZS's excellent touch up facility to remove the halos.

 
So following the kind of logic on the ZS website, I decided (due to noise) to go with the DMap image as the base, and then quickly ran across using the PMax to pick out missing details and touch up some nasty artefacts that were around.

I committed the retouch and saved the project after this as I had hit memory issues earlier, which happened to be a really good job as the whole thing hung up and crashed.

There were still a lot of halo's. Basically using PMax I could touch up internal halos, but it left dark halo's where I had a very light highlight in the background. I just grabbed the relevant image from the stack and simply touched in those highlights.

The main way to work was in single maximised view, using Shift and S to select and switch between images, roaming around and touching in the bits that were bad. It is much easier than using the PS tools. I did try helicon but never in anger, so cannot compare with that.

Eventually I got my image to the point I can make a nice large print of some orchids, it was painful, but as I say better than PS

I still hate focus stacking!

I'd be really interested to hear from anyone who may have better experiences doing this. Would be great to share tips here.
 
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