I am sure that my experience with the performance of both apps is not representative of what you could achieve with a functioning computer and could potentially have affected my impressions of the experience. I have not had the pleasure of making such an acquaintance with the mind(s) behind Helicon Soft.įinally, a couple of general comments about this project and my conclusions:Īll of this work was done on the same prehistoric MacBook Pro. I do know Rik Littlefield of Zerene Systems in a professional capacity and hold him in high regard. It may (or may not) increase your confidence in my findings to know that I have no financial ties to either company. However, being conscious of this potential, I have taken pains to remain objective and frequently sought input from disinterested friends when assessing image quality. As a long time user of Zerene Stacker, I recognize that I am prone to selection bias when judging the quality of outputs from the two programs. Some of the factors that differentiate the two programs are quite objective, others are purely subjective. I have tried to select the most representative examples from the many stacks to give you as complete a picture of this exercise as possible, but my final summary and the conclusions that are drawn come from the entire experience and not just from this limited collection of examples, shown here. The subjects also varied from the most simple (smooth, sharp, high contrast, little detail) to the most challenging (hairy black spider against black background, for example). I am not going to get into the details of every setup, but suffice to say that the actual input images were identical, being sourced from a single image series, regardless of the lens used. The test stacks consist of a wide range of different lens configurations, from a simple macro lens, to a high magnification infinity corrected microscope objective, and everything in between. Whatever you want, they will have it and, anyway, just how many times will you have an opportunity to give me someone else’s money, to support my work while doing something you were going to do anyway? Never! Press that black button, and go over to Amazon and buy a nuclear power plant, an exoplanet, the PB&J Barbie, or a full set of dental instruments. It is a great way for you to help me cover the significant expenses of running this dog and pony show, just by doing your shopping. This is the kind of reliable storage device that every serious photographer should own (and the kind of thing that I will be able to afford for the channel, one day) and you should consider getting one, but even if you end up getting something entirely different, we still may earn a little. If you enter Amazon using this link, and then buy something (pretty much anything), it doesn’t have to be this stunning Glyph RAID array storage device- you just need to walk into the store through my door, and my channel will earn a small commission, paid by Amazon, not by you. Please forgive the interruption- this is an affiliate link to Amazon. I have included notes to help guide you through these findings, but it is still worth the effort to open these images and look carefully for the differences and similarities between the outputs from the various processes. I have used the same image labelling convention throughout. When possible, I will try to show comparable images together (Helicon-B with Zerene Dmap, Helicon C with Zerene Pmax) and sometimes I will present the best output from each program (HF-Final, ZS-Final). Every image in this article can be opened at full resolution just by clicking on it.
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