... I should probably listen to my own advice...Think I'll reserve any more comments until I've developed a better "feel" for the program.
... but evaluating this is a work in progress. And I wanted to "withdraw" my earlier comment about controlling the contrast increase with different program parameters.
Not really effective. When I try stacks with very deep shadows and/or highlights that are very light, the contrast increase is a problem, regardless of the parameters I set. The only thing that seems to help is to "batch" modify the source files to a lower contrast. When I have tried this it does improve things considerably. I may need to do some additional levels/curves/saturation adjustments to the output image, but at least my histograms aren't running off the ends.