MacroLens wrote:I don't think I need the best results for pixel peeping. I like full size shots of flowers, leaves, vibrant looking ground cover, and foliage. The most important thing for me concerning stacking is the lack of noise which I detest. Then processing them before and/or after stacking to make sure I get the color and contrast I like. I am not even sure on a workflow once I do incorporate stacking.
Good color and contrast being the only two things more important to me than a lack of noise. Sharpness is probably in 4th place.
MacroLens,
There is no reason you can't have good color and contrast, lack of noise, and high sharpness all at once. Also, your choice of stacking software shouldn't effect any of these very much. One's choice of stacking software is mostly about convenience, retouching capability, artifacts produced, support, and cost. Any competent stacking program will let you retain good color, contrast, and sharpness, and leave accumulation of noise within your control.
Minimizing noise happens mostly during image acquisition, and you likely know the drill: Shoot at base ISO whenever possible; expose to the right side of each color channel's histogram, checking that no channel is burned out (if not familiar with this, search on "ETTR"--exposure to the right); if dynamic range in a scene exceeds what a jpeg or tiff can handle, shoot raw and pull highlights and shadows into range during raw conversion.
Once you've captured low-noise images, choice of stacking algorithm influences accumulation of noise. Pyramid approaches (such as Zerene Stacker's PMax) tend to accumulate noise, while depth-map approaches (such as Zerene Stacker's DMap) tend not to. Combine ZM offers both approaches, as does Helicon Focus; I've no idea about Picolay. This said, in your work as you've described it--shallow stacks at 1x or so--it doesn't seem likely to me that either approach should accumulate much noise, given carefully-made input images.
As a third element in noise control, one can do noise suppression during raw conversion, prior to stacking. While I've found the need to do this occasionally, I wouldn't recommend it as standard procedure for someone doing shallow stacks at 1x or thereabouts. I find this only occasionally useful for subjects that have very low histogram values in a particular color channel--something that happens to me mostly at higher magnifications.
As for color and contrast, my sense is that if you keep your stack input images and stack outputs within the dynamic range available in your choice of formats, you will find it easy to tweak color and contrast in Photoshop (or whatever pixel editor you prefer). Pyramid stacking algorithms are generally considered to mess with color and contrast more than depth map algorithms. This said, I've found bother approaches workable in very deep, difficult stacks.
Does any of this help?
--Chris S.