Zerene Stacker

Author -

Allan Walls

Link to resource -

Review of resource

After about 2 years of working with Zerene Stacker and feeling comfortable with it, I started looking for more advanced options and techniques to see if I could speed things up and get better stacks. One of my frustrations was with image stacks of 20 and higher. Retouching can become even more time consuming by having to hunt through a ton of source images to find the one with the bit of detail I need. A couple of times in the past I’d sent smaller batches of photos to Zerene, stacked them and sent the output files back to Lightroom and then sent those back in to be stacked.

OMG - I was slabbing or creating sub-stacks, but in a manual way not knowing Zerene can do it for you with more automation and flexible settings. I think I just searched for Zerene tutorials and found the highly proficient and very dryly funny Allan Walls at Allan Walls Photography.

By watching his videos I’ve learned a lot of time saving tips, techniques and workflow ideas that have improved my images and shortened my editing time. If you are doing a lot of stacking or have been looking to get better with Zerene, it’s worth the time to watch most of his material. When you click the link above just search for Zerene. He even has face off with Helicon Focus and a lot to say about that.

If you prefer written material his articles are extensive, detailed and contain a lot of example photos.

His YouTube Channel is here -

3 Likes

Thanks for sharing this, Kris. Tons of information on his website. Good stuff, but it is clearly going to take me a while to get through it. Thanks again.

You’re welcome! And yeah, it’s a lot, but if you have time to get it in chunks, that’s the best way. He does super macro stuff with microscope objectives and hundreds of photos - none of that applies to me, but I’ve taken some of his advice and ideas and I can see the benefits already.

1 Like

Thanks for sharing. A lot to learn here!

There is, but it’s helpful. I recently did an 87-shot stack that I’d still be retouching if I hadn’t used the slabbing feature in Zerene. Makes it so much less work and gives a more detailed and richly colored result. Especially if you do multiple DMaps to dial in the starting image. Changing some of the parameters to direct the estimation radius (where the software looks for the next bit of sharp detail) and the contrast threshold for DMaps is really crucial. I never experimented with it before so I still don’t have it totally figured out, but at least I try different things so I can learn.