Stacking - CombineZP vs The GIMP

Finally had time to "play" with CombineZP (CZP) and decided to post my results for you guys.

First of all, I'm fairly new to stacking so this commentary is mainly for fellow "newbies" in this amazing world. If you're an old hand, please add a word of encouragement to help us on our way

So, my aim was to compare freeware: namely CombineZP and The GIMP.

I love the GIMP for many reasons and though not a "GIMP guru", am fairly competent these days at manipulating layers and masks, so when a rainbow bug landed on our balcony a while back, I was happy to play with some macro shots in layers.

The first shot (below) is the result, and took about 20-30 minutes using layers & masks. I think you can see that for an insect about 13mm long, it's possible to produce a reasonable image. I could "do better" now, but that's not the point of this thread....

The second shot was using CZP for the first time. I took about 20 minutes to produce this, including image resizing before loading the stack. I didn't clone out the double antennae on purpose, to show a flaw, but doing so would be very easy back in GIMP-land!

So, my thoughts are these:
1) WOW! CZP is (after you get through the interface) remarkably easy to use, and creating stacks in there could, I think, get some great results.
2) Speed - CZP is much quicker than using layers/masks.
3) Aligning/scaling images = automatic in CZP (for this stack) and much more simple than using layers.
4) Stability - I had to take out 5 images to get the stack to "work" in CombineZP, and that's after reducing the initial images from around 4MB per image to around 175KB...so unless I'm missing something, CZP has some issues if you're going for really deep DoF from many "slices".
5) Interface - well, people often complain about the GIMP, but it just takes practice, so even though I'm not 100% with CZP I guess it'll be intuitive after a few more uses.

Conclusion:

I love to GIMP (see my sig.) but as long as I'm trying for stacks with my 100mm macro, from now on, I think I'll try out CZP first, before using layers/masks in the GIMP.

Any thoughts and/or comments about your experiences with any of this (or other) stacking software, please add.

Cheers all,
Simon

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Interesting comparison and lovely shots. Obviously the antenna problem in the CZP stack would be fairly easy to repair.
Suspect the issue with CZP is probably down to available memory in the PC or some memory setting in CZP
Having used the Combine series for many years have to say they are very good especially as they are free, but I do find zerene stacker has several advantages but has the big disadvantage of not being free.

Brian v.

LordV wrote in post #9631639
Interesting comparison and lovely shots. Obviously the antenna problem in the CZP stack would be fairly easy to repair.
Suspect the issue with CZP is probably down to available memory in the PC or some memory setting in CZP
Having used the Combine series for many years have to say they are very good especially as they are free, but I do find zerene stacker has several advantages but has the big disadvantage of not being free.

Brian v.

Thanks for commenting Brian.
I've not even looked "into" CZP yet as to memory use, but I expect on the CZP forum there's help to be found.
Apart from that tweak, and when we get some better lighting, my next task will be to do a more up-to-date test with anything I can find now, as opposed to a picture from last year....

You guys have the problem of clippings or lines that clearly show something wrong happened with the aligning in the software? I'm not sure what I do wrong--the camera was perfectly still but when it comes to stacking the images, they don't stack well. Is the laptop too weak to let it stack the images properly? Weird. Thx!

SuperHuman21 wrote in post #9698918
You guys have the problem of clippings or lines that clearly show something wrong happened with the aligning in the software? I'm not sure what I do wrong--the camera was perfectly still but when it comes to stacking the images, they don't stack well. Is the laptop too weak to let it stack the images properly? Weird. Thx!

If the software runs on the laptop without errors then it should be ok.

Brian V.

LordV wrote in post #9699042
If the software runs on the laptop without errors then it should be ok.

Brian V.

Hm. If I'll remember, I'll be sure to post a couple of examples of what I mean, unless it works out fine on the beefier desktop.

Should add that getting odd effects around the borders of the stack is pretty normal - you need to crop those off (caused by the FOV changing)
Brian v.

This is interesting. I've not tried gimp, but have recently been trying out CombineZP, and demos of Zerene, and Helicon. I too am new to this stacking stuff.

I found combineZP to work fairly well (and it's free). I just do "align pics" then "do stack". Sometimes reversing order of pics or doing the align thorough seems to work well. Some of the edges need cropping but works well.

Zerene seems to have less (waste in edges of image) , but if I'm being honest the stack seems little better to me ( not enough for me to justify paying for it ). Seems to run quicker. I just did the one click go and do it command. Not sure if there's any particular tweaks that can be done.

Helicon - the demo seems to hang on my machine, so maybe need to reinstall and try again. I'll post a seperate thread with a fly I took yesterday and combined in ZP.