So, which is it?

In this final part of the discussion, I will sum up my findings and try to make sense of what is going on in the focus stacking marketplace. And then I will bring everything together in to a few recommendations for what makes the most sense to me, in 2021.

My sincere thanks to the extraordinary Laura Guyon for her excellent work in preparing these articles for publication, all at a moment’s notice, and for helping perpetuate the fiction that I can spell.

This has been a long but enjoyable process. I came into it expecting to find Zerene a better product in every way. That was, after all, why I chose Zerene Stacker as my stacking software when it was time for me to get serious about my work. That was quite some time ago and there weren’t that many people that I knew using anything but Zerene. So, I was surprised but excited to see that there was some serious competition, after all. Helicon has come a long way since I first tried it out. That is good for us and it is good for Zerene. This is the kind of healthy competition that keeps everyone on their toes. In fact, I was so surprised on the first shooting day of this project, that when I saw the speed with which Helicon ripped through stacks and saw the quality of the initial few batches of  simple stacks, I immediately called my friend Mike, another Zerene guy but several time zones to my left, and yelled down the line, “Mike, Just saw the first few outputs from this Helicon stacking software and it is nothing like what I was expecting.” He responded by muttering something that might have been a friendly “cheerio”, but which sounded more like an unambiguous death threat, before hanging up on me, as he does every time I call at 3AM. 

Well that was day one, and I have taken a lot of photographs since then. I feel like I know both of these programs very well indeed, though I have to admit I have plenty of work to do in Helicon’s retouching environment. But my lack of experience  with Helicon’s retouching is only part of the story. Because I could have all the experience in the world and it is not going to make up for the fact that there are some things this otherwise great program just cannot do. And I think that is a serious problem for Helicon. Lightning fast stacking is a great way to start, but for virtually every high magnification stack, unless you also have a top notch retouching functionality, and everything that supports retouching, like slabbing and selective stacking, the tool is not going to get the job finished. I firmly believe that the only reliable yardstick by which we can measure the performance of a focus stacking software tool, is the quality of the final image. But is this a fair standard by which either of these programs should be judged?

I am going to interrupt myself again. One of the practical ways in which you can support my work and keep fresh content flowing is by making a slight change in the way you do your online shopping. Below is a link, an Amazon Affiliate link, to one of my favorite lenses. It is the Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 Di VC G2 and I use it for everything including portraits, sports, wildlife, and as a reliable 200mm relay lens for use with my Nikon and Mitutoyo microscope objectives. It is a lens I recommend very highly. Clicking the buy button will take you to this product in the Amazon store, and if you buy this lens I may make a small fee for referring you to Amazon. But did you know that if you use this same button to enter Amazon but don’t buy this lens, and instead buy almost anything else, from televisions to tortoise shell spectacles, iron-on temporary tattoos (not recommended) to tea tree toothpaste, we still may earn a small commission, paid by Amazon, not by you. This is a great lens at a great price, and it’s one that you will treasure for years to come, so click on the link, look at the specs and the reviews and, while you are there, pick up those things that have been sitting in your shopping basket since last Christmas. It is a great way for you to get the best prices on all your gear and help me at the same time. Press that black button, look at that lovely Tamron and pick up the Dora the Explorer bedspread that you’ve being eyeing while you’re there. Thank you!

Maybe final image quality is too strict a criteria on which to compare focus stacking programs, but it is the de facto standard that has been set by Zerene. Just because retouching is an integral part of every focus stacking run I do, does not make it the only way to get the same results. I am willing to stipulate that many, or even most Helicon users who never retouch output images can use the program for years without even being aware of the functions that it does not offer. But the artifact that can never be completely prevented or removed from more complex stacking jobs must be getting fixed somewhere, even if it isn’t in Helicon. Is it being removed in Photoshop, or “cloned out” in Helicon? So for Helicon to have become as widely accepted as it is, stacking artifact is either:

1. being ignored;

2. minimized, at the cost of image quality, by using pyramid outputs only;

3. being removed by painstaking single frame retouching, or

4. being removed after leaving Helicon, using compositing tools in a photo editor like Photoshop.

I am a strong proponent of using Photoshop for the final cleanup of any stacked image. There are any number of operations that Photoshop just does better than the competition, but I would not be able to rely on Photoshop for retouching focus stacked images. Why is that? Why must the first step always happen in the stacking environment? It is because of the fact that neither stacking algorithm can yield all the information needed in the highest quality images. An image like that of the hunting wasp above, required the Dmap Zerene output for the amazing colors and rich textures, but without taking fine detail from the Pmax outputs, the mouthparts, ocelli, and even the pollen grains stuck to the vesper’s forehead, would have been obscured by thick ropes of Dmap halo artifact. While I am certainly open to other creative workflows that could yield a result as good or better than that above, I don’t understand why anyone would want to reinvent the wheel that has so meticulously crafted by the engineers at Zerene Systems.

You have been very patient! Let’s talk for a moment about the prices. I am going to assume that any serious macro photographer purchasing either of these products is doing  so with the intention to use most, if not all of the program’s capabilities, either right away or at some time in the future. So I will assume that nobody reading this article would have much interest in purchasing Helicon Light, a stacking program that lacks all retouching capabilities. I would go a little further and question why such a product even exists. Even when stacking two frames there is the possibility of something needing to be retouched, surely? Anyway, there is no photographer to whom I would recommend that package. Which leaves only a couple of options. Helicon Focus may be “rented” for $55 per year, or purchased outright for $200. All updates and upgrades are included in those prices and Helicon offers a discount if you start with the yearly plan and upgrade to the permanent  arrangement. They have a premium offering that includes the Helicon Remote feature for an addition $40. Actually, the plan comes with the desktop version of Helicon Remote, you only have to pay the extra $40 if you want to get the mobile version of the feature.

Zerene offers four levels of ownership. The first is a student version for $39. It is the full program, from what I hear. I put on my shorts, Angus Young blazer and school cap in the hopes I would qualify for the $39 deal. But they caught me at checkout by posing the tricky question, “are you a student?”. The next version up the ladder is the personal plan. I’d tell you what was in that plan, but I can’t. It’s personal. 

I think it has everything except batch processing and the brainy brushes for retouching - and please believe me that if you want to get everything out of this amazing program, you need those features. The one you want is the Prosumer edition (am I the only person who hates that word?) - it has everything. This is the full-featured Zerene Stacker, recognized by the world over as the industry standard. The full monty, so to speak, and it is all yours for one low monthly payment of $189, and you can keep using it until you die. This has everything the Professional Edition has, the retouching tools, the batch processing, and the small velvet pouch you keep it in when not in use (not that last part - no pouch - you can’t keep a computer program in a pouch). If you are a professional and, by that, they mean if you use Zerene Stacker to make pictures that you then sell for money, you should get the professional edition. I was relieved to see there is no mention of an “Attempted Professional” Edition License for individuals trying unsuccessfully to sell photographs made using the program. The Professional edition is $289, and is also good until you die.

If advanced mathematics is not your thing, that makes Zerene Stacker eleven dollars cheaper than Helicon focus, until you sell a picture. Just make sure you sell your fist picture for at least $100 to cover the cost of your new license.

What has this long six weeks told me about the Helicon product, you may or may not be wondering? Helicon is lightning fast. I have never seen such rapid stacking, and the outputs are of uniformly high quality. I get the feeling that there is something “color-management” related going on in the preparation of the C method outputs, but I lack the knowledge to even hazard a guess as to what that could be. They were usually more saturated, less noisy, with just a tad less contrast than the Zerene’s corresponding Pmax images. It wasn’t striking, but it was there. I also discovered that I do not like giving up full control of the contrast threshold when running B-stacks in Helicon. You can adjust the contrast before stacking, but that is not ideal. You can also change the setting and stack again, but that will eat into the time advantage the program offers, which may bother some users. But there were few occasions where I felt the B outputs could have been improved by changing the contrast threshold. The A method seems like something that could be phased out. I’m not sure what the advantages are of using it, even just in theory. In practice, there were only a couple of useable A outputs, early in my experience with very simple stacks but, even then, the B was always better looking. 

I hate to keep banging on about this, but the most significant weakness in the Helicon program is the lack of a slabbing modality. There is no way around it. There is simply no alternative to slabbing for completing very deep stacks, and retouching them, in the shortest possible time to yield the highest possible quality images. I tried every workaround that I could think of but was unable to find a way to create (and retouch from) a series of sub stacks while retaining the ability to stack from a pyramid output and the original individual input images, if needed. Without them, the only option is to  retouch from individual inputs or full stack outputs. This is reasonable at less than 1:1 and with well contrasted, simple stacks, but it becomes virtually impossible at 20:1. When it comes to satisfying that subset of high magnification, deep stack, macro perfectionists, Helicon will simply not be able to compete with Zerene Stacker until it implements this functionality and a way to stack manually selected sub-stacks as needed during retouching.

Helicon offers some interesting bells and whistles, but I found there was never a situation in which I needed to use them. In my own workflow and as a recommendation I make to all my students, the final image should get looked over in Photoshop as a final step. I do it every time, even if I have no specific plan. But I usually have a grain of sand or a stray bristle to attend to and as I hate the Lightroom spot removal tool and I prefer to make color adjustments in Photoshop, it has just become a routine final step. That is the primary reason that I didn’t use these tools, but there is one other reason that I would avoid using a clone stamp tool, or a texture transfer tool in a stacking program. These changes in Helicon are destructive. You can’t change your mind later on, as the edits get baked into the output. With Photoshop I can make changes non-destructively and by making the adjustments on separate layers, I can toggle them on and off at will. At the end of the day, I want my focus stacking software to stack my images and let me composite the various outputs into a final stacked photograph. Everything else can be done in Lightroom or in Photoshop when I am done with the stacking and retouching. 

 Helicon has a few other things that it needs to square away before it will be good enough to possibly pose an existential threat for Zerene. It needs to be more stable. I have no idea  why the program closed down when my internet was momentarily  interrupted, but it did, repeatedly. I was running stacks day and night in this evaluation and though I planned to show at least some of the results, these stacks were not about the final images. If they had been, if I was under deadline pressure to get highest quality final images out the door on schedule and was having my stacker pack in when it rained hard, I would not have been a happy camper. When a photographer is investing this much time and effort into each individual photograph, platform stability has to be virtually guaranteed. 

I don’t want to make a big deal about the lack of follow-up from Helicon. I hope they didn’t get back to me because they were too busy taking care of their customers, but it has put me on alert to a possible issue. It is  a sad fact that in this day and age, it is so rare to find a product whose manufacturer is honorable, committed, invested in the customer’s satisfaction, reliable, and responsive to issues the moment they arise. Rare, but not impossible. Zerene Systems is such a company and, with that kind of concierge approach to customer relations, they have set the bar very high indeed. And that is what Helicon is going head to head against and they will fail to rise to the challenge at their peril. I will add one last thought before moving on. About three weeks ago, Helicon’s representative invited me to participate in the ongoing beta testing of the latest upgrade to Helicon Focus. I saw this as an excellent opportunity for me to evaluate the latest version and see what changes were in store. I accepted the offer and revised my production schedule to add a two-week delay so that I would have time to review the new beta and revise the content of the video and this series of articles, as needed. But I never heard back from them about this or about the unresolved questions I had asked weeks earlier.

I have said very little about Zerene. That is what happens when one half of the products you are reviewing happens to be the industry standard. Zerene is nowhere as fast in the initial stacking process. Not even close. But  it doesn’t crash. I think of the added time for the initial stacking run as an investment in the future of the project. A few minutes of time saved is never justification for lower image quality. So I take my time to set up the stack properly, to check for dropped frames, alignment or exposure issues, and I don’t feed it anything that will upset Zerene’s mysterious innards. If I ensure that I have the room on my disc and have the recommended amount of memory allocated, the program will not falter and it will not crash. I have crashed Zerene twice and both times it was because I had too many processes running on my ancient computer and I ran out of application memory. I hardly ever run simple, single stacks. That is because most of what I photograph is very small and I am often using high magnification. My stacks are often large, so I always slab, It has become an important part of my workflow and it is now  routine, even though it greatly increases my initial processing time. I am careful to set a good ER in Dmap, and I spend a minute considering what will give the best result from my choice of contrast threshold settings. I will repeat parts of the process until I am happy with the images. That may mean running three or more Dmap stacks, if that’s what it takes. And all of that time and effort is invested for one reason - to make the retouching smooth, simple, and sure to result in the highest possible image quality in my final image. 

With rare exception, this slow and deliberate workflow ends up saving me time on every image. If the Helicon stack is going to need anything more than a very simple localized retouch, I can count on the workflow that I use to be faster and yield better final results, even though the quality of the intermediate Helicon images is often higher than those of Zerene. I have never had a client ask to see what my images looked like halfway through the processing. We need to keep our eye on the one thing that matters - the quality of the final image. But anyway, that is just my workflow. It is how I get the results that I do. Your mileage may vary, but it won’t vary by much. Before I give you my recommendations, let me sum up by giving you my overall impressions from this 4,000 image, 6-week marathon:

1. Zerene is a superior focus stacking program and should be the first choice for photographers at all levels, in terms of final image quality and time investment.

2. Zerene Stacker is currently the only commercially available focus stacking software solution that includes a complete set of batch processing and retouching tools to support advanced retouching workflows like slabbing.

3. Helicon has broken new ground and set a new benchmark for speed by developing a sophisticated focus stacking process that has drastically decreased the time required to stack projects of all sizes.

4. In my estimation, the outputs from Helicon Methods “B” and “C” are at least as good and were on numerous occasions, and in a variety of different project types, better (cleaner, less artifact, better color consistency) than the corresponding outputs of the Zerene “Dmap” and “Pmax” Algorithms.

5. Despite producing high quality output images considerably faster than the Zerene product during the initial phase of the focus stacking workflow, the lack of sub-stack retouching capacity greatly hindered retouching with a resulting deleterious impact on final image quality, especially as the stack size increased.

6. Helicon appears to be susceptible to crashing with loss of current work in situations where internet connectivity is unstable and transient internet disconnection occurs.

7. In my personal experience, time savings accrued to the faster processing time in Helicon Focus are lost when anything but the simplest retouching is required, due to the tedious process of single frame source retouching of single image source retouching.

My Recommendations for You

This is not going to take long.

I recommend that you purchase Zerene Stacker Prosumer Edition, from Zerene Systems and use it for all your focus stacking needs, unless you fall into one of the following categories:

1. You are not a photographer.

2. You are a photographer but you have never done a focus stacking operation and do not foresee any reasonably likely circumstance in which you might.

For the sake of clarity let me specify that my recommendation is also explicitly directed at individuals in the following categories:

1. Current owners of a valid Helicon license at any level.

2. Inexperienced macro photographers who have been advised to purchase Helicon for any reason.

3. Somewhat experienced macro photographers who use Helicon for their focus stacking regularly, but have never seen the need for using any method beside method C, and have never given retouching a try.

4. New macro photographers who are terrified of complicated, potentially technical things and have already decided to never stack more than 4 images at a time.

In the following statements I will outline the basis for this recommendation and for the inclusion of the aforementioned categories in the intended audience:

1. Zerene is a complete suite of fully functional, mature and tested focus stacking software tools. It is stable, reliable, and affordable.

2. Zerene is the only commercially available focus stacking software suite that is optimized for the prevention and removal of focus stacking artifact and provides the user with control over all critical stacking parameters. It has the most complete set of retouching tools available on the market today.

3. Zerene can handle the simplest and the most complicated stacking problems with results that are predictable and repeatable, even across versions.

4. Access to a very rapid stacking tool would be advantageous to many macro photographers, but only to the extent that inadequate retouching functionality would not immediately undo any time savings.

5. All focus stacking causes some degree of artifact formation and retained or partially corrected artifact does not generally result in final images of higher quality, therefore all artifact should be prevented or removed if possible.

The following arguments are logically flawed or incomplete and do not justify departure from the recommendation:

1. Millions of people use Helicon (millions of people smoke cigarettes).

2. I have never seen artifact in my stacks (you are not stacking correctly and/or often enough).

3. Their site says they have full retouching capability (and it also says they have RAW-in, DNG-out).

4. But they are improving Helicon all the time (yes, so is Zerene, but if and when their product is better than that of Zerene I will recommend you switch back).

5. I have already paid my $200 to Helicon (one unfortunate spending decision does not require that you compound it with another).

6. I don’t intend to do complicated operations like slabbing (you didn’t intend to do complicated operations like focus stacking either).

7. I don’t know how to retouch (Yet - but you are in the right place to learn).

8. It is a waste of $200 (only if you continue to use it*).

9. I have already learned how to use Helicon (Good, it will help you master Zerene).

10. My pictures aren’t good enough for the stacker I pick to make any difference (How do you know?).

11. I’ve already committed to use Helicon (Compounding a poor decision is another poor decision).

12. You just hate Helicon (On the contrary, I do not know the Folks at Helicon. But even if I did, these recommendations have nothing to do with my likes and dislikes. I admit that I am disappointed by disingenuous statements in some of their marketing materials but that has no direct bearing on this recommendation).

13. How much is Zerene paying you to say this (Minus $189 so far, but I’m hoping to get a raise of another negative $100 when I sell a picture and upgrade my license).

14. Helicon is plenty good enough for the average photographer ( your goal is not to become an above average photographer?).

*There is one special type of Helicon user that deserves a special mention. This is the advanced macro photographer who uses both Helicon and Zerene in a workflow that takes advantage of the special attributes of both. These users run every stack through Helicon as a preliminary step, in order to determine the likelihood of a high quality image resulting from a fully retouched stack. When I first heard of this tactic I thought it sounded like a waste of both money and time. But after following this protocol for a couple of weeks, I was surprised to see how effective it was for saving time by avoiding a full stacking run for borderline stacks that proved disappointing. I was also impressed by its ability to catch good photographs that otherwise would have been left unstacked based solely on the appearance of the input files. Whether or not this workflow can justify the high price of entry remains to be seen, but I am currently using Helicon as a screening tool for a further test period.

In conclusion, Zerene Stacker is the best stacker on the market today. It is the least expensive yet it has the most complete set of relevant features. I expect that Helicon may well close the gap at some point but the likelihood that they can reengineer their entire product in a single upgrade is low. That a single upgrade will result in a product that is at least as stable as, while including all the functionality of, the Zerene product also seems improbable. It is more likely that Helicon will add functionality in increments, with testing before, during and after each major feature addition. This is a process that takes considerable time and there is a lot of work that Helicon will need to complete. Helicon Soft is competing against an established and popular software company with a mature, world-class stacking program that has been the choice of National Geographic, Nikon and many of the world’s most celebrated macro photographers. It is likely that Helicon Focus will become a more competitive product in the near future, though I doubt Zerene Systems will be resting on their laurels in the meantime.

Author’s Note:

Earlier today I was asked why I had so much time and work into this project? Well it started out as just a simple fact finding mission and a few simple test shots. My intention was to work with both products for long enough to tell you which one would be best for your style of photography. But the more time I spent in Helicon the more I came to realize how heavily I depend on Zerene to get it right every time. I guess I had never really taken in how important this piece of software has been to macro photography over the years, or how significant a contribution Zerene’s inventor, Rik Littlefield, has made to our work or hobby. But I came to appreciate how very fortunate we are to have a champion like Rik Littlefield. Although I have never met the man in person, he is something of a legend in the macro world. An extreme macro photographer of some repute, it is his DNA that runs through the amazing Photomacrography website and forum. He has devoted a chunk of his life to bringing us the piece of software I have been talking about, Zerene Stacker, and it shows. So, while this started out as a straight comparison between two superficially similar pieces of software, it has morphed into an opportunity for me to make the case for supporting a family business that has been supporting what we do for many years. Let me be very clear, Zerene Stacker is the better stacking software available today, and I would recommend it regardless. I just wanted to give you one more reason to choose Zerene, and give back a little of what Rik has given all of us.

Which focus stacking software should you be using?

In October 2021, it is Zerene Stacker.

All the best,

Allan