Recommendations Stacking Software for Hand Held JPEGs?

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KenO
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Dec 03, 2012 11:41 am

Recommendations Stacking Software for Hand Held JPEGs?

Post by KenO »

Hi,

Have I series of hand held JPEGs made under low light conditions so have some grain.

Would like to stack to improve the final photo but the app must have either manual or auto align for these JPGs.

Hope some others have had similar problems and have some tips and recommendations.

Thanks

Ken

JH
Posts: 1307
Joined: Sat Mar 09, 2013 9:46 am
Location: Vallentuna, Stockholm, Sweden
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Post by JH »

Hi KenO

Are you talking about focus stacking or some type of blending to reduce noice/grain?

If it is focus stacking, I would reduce noice/grain and sensor dust in a photo editning program such as Adobe LR or Adobe PS before focus stacking.

For focus stacking I use and recomend Zerene stacker and Helicon focus. Both programs align pictures.

Depending on the pictures you have you might find problems that the programs can not handle such as:
1) pictures does not align so well - the programs can handle X,Y and Z movements but not pictures where the subject have twisted or the camera have tilted.
2) the result will have focus banding

Hand held stacking almost always need quite a lot of retouching. When it comes to making substacks and retouching from them my opinion is that Zerne stacker has the edge. If you have Helicon Focus the work around for a sub-stack is to have the first picture in the entire stack as the first picture in the sub-stack.

For blending to reduce noice/grain I use Adobe PS. Import the files in one stack, let PS do the alignment during import. Make a smart object of the photos/layers. Then use Smart object / Mean or Median.

Hope this helps

Jörgen Hellberg
Jörgen Hellberg, my webbsite www.hellberg.photo

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