[BrianR]

I thought I'd try out the Zerene demo, so far it's pretty impressive. Here's a photo of two overlapping moth wings (both Laurel Sphinx moths) with a gap between them. It's not a huge gap, but this is the kind of thing that CS4 seemed to struggle with, sharp stuff in front of sharp stuff, so I thought it would be an interesting test. I've also been somewhat obsessed with the patterns, colours, and textures of moth wings, so, yea.

K5iis, DFA100mm@f/11 + Raynox DCR250 (approximately 2x magnification), 8 shot stacks. These are the entire frame:



Below are approximately 1 to 1 crops of where the wings overlap (leading wing on the left).

CS4 had trouble with the leading wings edge. It also had trouble in the white area. Cleaning up the white bit would be quick, the wing edge - not so much.

The Zerene program gives two stacking options, DMap and PMax. DMap overall gave nicer results than PMax, but handled the wing edge about the same as CS4 (it had no trouble with the white band or any other area), which PMax dealt with quite well. Zerene includes a touch up tool that made combining PMax's treatment of wing edge with DMap's treatment of everything else a 10 second editing job (seriously!).



Zerene is looking like it might be worth springing for, but I'll do more testing.

[WPRESTO]

I've been using Zerene for some time, generally getting better results with PMAX (do the stack with both methods, then select the better which is most commonly PMAX). The greatest problem I have is insect hairs protruding sideways, where there are far OOF hairs behind. The latter are preserved as a bright, annoying "halo" along the sides of the insect.