How To Focus Stack In Zerene Stacker - Macro Photography Workflow 

One of the most helpful videos that took my macro to the next level. This video is gold. Thank you sir for your contributions !

I can see your channel taking off quickly, mixture of in field walks with occasional workflow thrown in, fast becoming one of my favourite macro channels. Been using Zereene for a long time now it has some amazing built in tools.

I’ve never been happy with stacking in Photoshop so I will give Zerene a go. Hope you do some more videos like this as there’s quite a lot to pick up in one go! Thank you for sharing all this as I know how long it can take to work it all out….

Great to see your editing process. love all the tips. Thanks Jamie :D

Final image amazing

Thank you for this video! All of your videos are great for people to learn from, and your images are amazing. Keep it up!

Really nice video, and cool to see some of your editing workflow! I have quite a similar process in zerene, one thing I'd recommend is you can retouch the dmap stack using part of the pmax stack. pmax tends to render areas with overlapping focus areas like multiple hairs much better, so I usually start with the dmap stack (since like you said the colors are better on that), and paint in the parts that pmax rendered better. After that I still often do quite a bit of retouching from the input frames, but using the best parts of both methods definitely saves some time.

Nice video again Jamie, thanks!

simple and good! thank you and keep walking

I like your process. Since you go through so much detail I suggest something that I've found useful. I've found that I very often find stuff later that I've missed so 13:21 instead of flattening after all that work, keep the layers in a group, dupe the group and flatten that. That way there's always a path for me to fix stuff without having to remember all the steps I went through. Especially when you get into smart filters/layers and detailed layer adjustments. If you're just futzing around with one photo merging and moving on works. But if you have a bunch of work and deadlines, being able to walk your editing back is a huge time saver. And it's less HD intensive than saving multiple versions. This way you're keeping the multiple versions in one file. It also helps to name your groups and layers. You always think you're surely going to remember what you did, but even a few weeks later it's a mystery without naming things.

Nice tour of your workflow. You mention how long and tedious it can be retouching some end photos in Zerene Stacker. I think that part of the problem is caused by using the DMax option instead of PMax. I have been steadily doing focus stacking for 5 years now, using Helicon Focus mostly, Affinity Photo occasionally, and Zerene Stacker almost exclusively for the last 3 months. PMax (or the equivalent, e.g. Method C in Helicon Focus) is better for subjects with overlapping features at diffferent planes, such as insects legs. PMax is more contrasty, but it takes less time to adjust this in the photo editor than endless retouching in the focus stacking software. You can also reduce the contrast in the photos before submitting them to the focus stacking software. My workflow starts by culling useless photos and creating a folder for each stack using Faststone Image Viewer (a great software with lots of uses). Then I process each stack with Dxo PhotoLab 6. This is the longest part of the workflow because I shoot in CRAW (Canon) and I found that DeepPrime noise reduction makes a big difference even when shooting at 200 ISO. The exported JPGs are then sent to the focus stacking software. I switched from Helicon Focus to Zerene Stacker mostly because of the alignment process. Zerene Stacker and Affinity Photo are more robust at accurately aligning my photos, which are often wobbly because I exclusively do hand-held focus bracketing. I found that trying to manually adjust the alignment parameters by trial and error in Helicon Focus is tedious. However the retouching tools are more powerful in HF, and the interface is more modern and elaborate, with options to save 3D movies, etc. The final editing (crop, horizon, contast, light,etc ) is done in Dxo PhotoLab, and I occasionally use Topaz Labs software to improve sharpness or reduce noise. If you want to see some of my results, you can check on iNaturalist, my tag is cback. By the way Wolf Amri did a nice video on focus stacking that complements yours ( ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qALLm6m_h1w.html ). Keep going on, your videos are always interesting to watch.

Fantastic video! I think more macro content creators should share their stacking and editing process

Awesome work from you. Heavily Underrated! Glad i founf your channel

Love your channel 🙂Very informative video. You inspired me to try Zerene

Good 👍

Great video Jamie, I have just bought an Olympus set up for macro, keep up the workflow videos! BTW your macro shots are next level mate 👌

Hi, I'm new to macro photography, and I really like your channel, and I wanted to know how you take so many photos with the flash without losing power, or what do you recommend for focus bracketing, in terms of power settings and taking photos, thanks

Thanks for great stacking process video, very interested to know your process to capture so many consecutive shots in order of front to back focus plane to be used in stacking software?

Hi Jamie! Excellent video! Have you tried Helicon Focus? It looks like Zerene Stacker works the same as Helicon. Just was curious if they are comparable or one is better than the other? Thanks again!

Thanks for sharing your focus stack editing process Jamie. It's really very instructive to see, but it does also demonstrate that there's a *lot* of post-processing work involved to create each focus stacked image (and presumably quite a powerful PC?). I'm sure it's difficult to generalise, but roughly how much time on average would you say you spend at the computer to produce each final image?

Thanks for that. Have you compared this to stacking it in Photoshop?

so you took 116 images single shots ? Did you just keep moving back and forth while firing off shots. I know the focus bracketing mode can only do 99 so I'm assuming thats what you did? I'm just learning so sorry for all the questions.

Is the advantage of Zerene over Helicon the ability to edit your images before importing to the stacking software? Helicon will only import the unedited dng image. The stacked dng image can then be edited once staked.

You shoot these pictures with just a manual lens?

Very helpful video re image stacking workflow. I’ve been using Photoshop but can see how Zerene Stacker makes sense for big stacks. Is Zerene better than Helicon in your experience? Think I need to commit to one or the other. Cheers.