It seems like exactly what I'd expect from a dedicated tool vs the more general processor: it's faster, more effecient on resources and gives me noticeably better results. Even if the quality were the same, I'd buy it for the speed and convenience improvement, as well as the ability to save as DNG, but the image results are better as well. It'll be my normal processor moving forward. Is Helicon Focus worth having? My decision was yes, and I've bought a license. Overall, I'd give the Photoshop result a 7.5 of 10, and the Helicon Focus a 9. I expect it could be ignored, but I'd probably want to try to clean that up a bit. Interestingly, both of them have very slight halos around the yellow flower at the bottom, evidently a rendering artifact from the blurred version in the later images in the stack. Overall, both images are good, but I think the Helicon Focus image is a bit better. I like the colors better, the purple flowers on the left are much better, and the yellow center of the flowers on the right are brighter and sharper. The Helicon Focus in general is brighter and seems sharper to me. Overall, I prefer the Helicon Focus image. The end result (exported as a JPG) by Lightroom: As soon as it finished saving the image, Photoshop crashed (whee!).ĭuring processing, Photoshop grew to take up over 16Gb of memory, and made the system unusable for anything else, something I've only seen happen on this machine while rendering 4K video. After flattening the image, I saved it as an uncompressed TIFF file, which was a 166Mb file.

Processing the image took:Ĩ minutes for Photoshop to import the images and be ready to work on themĤ minutes to flatten the image for saving Not the most powerful model but it's pretty well built out. My current computer is a fairly recent iMac 5K, with a 3.8GHz i5, 25Gb of memory and a Radio Pro 580 GPU.

Once that's done, in Photoshop, you select all of the layers and run Edit->Auto-Align images followed by Edit->Auto-Blend layers choosing the stacking option. Photoshop creates a file and loads each image into a separate layer. This fires up Photoshop and hands the 45 images. To run the Photoshop test, I select the 45 images in Lightroom and then choose Photo->Edit in->Open as Layers in Photoshop. That's actually pretty good, but there's some sharpness falloff on the flowers to the right at the back.

Photo stacking in photoshop