Macro stacking

[GranvilleO]

I am sure that one or more of our more experienced members will be able to assist me.

Having signed up for a 30 day free trial of Zarine Stacker I am struggling to load any photos from Lightroom.

Could anyone / somebody please advise me on how to load onto Zarine ?

Thanks,

Granville

[IanT]

Hi Granville,

Open Zerene Stacker - there will be two blank windows on the left - the top one is where you put your files, the bottom is what the program produces. Your images should be taken in sequence - start by focusing at the front-most point of the subject, take a pic, move the focus plane back a tiny bit (how much will come to you with experience) either by racking the camera forward, or rotating the focus ring on your lens and take another pic. Continue like this until your focus plane is at the backmost point of the subject. As a guide, for - say - a fly, you need to end up with between 50 and 100 images. Process all of these images identically in whatever way you want (lightroom is good for this, because you can globally alter exposure, sharpness, blah, on all images at once by shift-clickin g the image range) then export them as 16 bit tiff. So, you now have 50-100 tiff files sequentially numbered.

Drag and drop them into the top left pane of Zerene and from the top menu click 'Stack', then 'Align and stack' - any of the options. Zerene will get to work, showing its progress in the images on the main window. It'll take a while to run through all the images, how long depends upon how much grunt you have in your PC.

When finished, there will be a filename in the bottom left window, which is the result, which you can then view/save.

Do all this using the tiffs before any editing work is done on them, except for the global environmental stuff that lightroom allows. You can then touch up or modify the output image as you like in your favorite editor.

Anything else?

[GranvilleO]

Hi Ian,

Many thanks indeed for your full and extremely helpful response to my query. Just what I was hoping for.

I look forward to putting your guidance into practice, perhaps over this weekend.

Hope you're keeping well and safe during these challenging times ?

Thanks again,

Granville