Aduku Stacker vs focus-stack

Aduku Stacker combines photographs taken at different focus distances into a sharp image, for macro, product, landscape and microscopy photography. The free app offers five merge methods: Wavelet, Pyramid, Weighted, Hybrid and Depthmap. Its default workflow processes images at 16-bit and uses 32-bit floating-point merge calculations, with memory-bounded batching for deep stacks. Automatic alignment uses feature matching and subpixel refinement; options include focus-breathing correction, homography, mesh warp and manual alignment seeding. It imports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, HEIC and DNG, and exports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, linear DNG and depth maps. Proprietary RAW files may require Adobe DNG Converter on macOS. Retouching lets users paint from aligned source frames, erase strokes and undo or redo, but there is no clone tool. Processing is local and does not require an internet connection. It runs on macOS 13 or later and 64-bit Windows 10/11; 8 GB RAM is sufficient for most stacks, with 16 GB recommended for deep 16-bit RAW stacks.

focus-stack is a free desktop program that combines photographs taken at different focus settings into an image with extended depth of field. For each pixel, it selects the sharpest source image, a method documented for uses such as microscope photography. The tool can resize and rotate stack images to align them, or alignment can be skipped or adjusted. Outputs include a focus-stacked image, an optional depth map, and a 3D preview based on that map. Input formats supported by OpenCV include JPG, PNG, and TIFF, while the filename extension determines output format. Processing controls cover denoising, consistency filtering, batch size, and thread count. OpenCV’s OpenCL interface provides GPU acceleration when available, with an option to disable it. Binary packages are listed for Windows 10, Ubuntu 20.04, and Mac OS X. The project is MIT licensed; Linux builds require OpenCV 3.0 or newer and basic build tools.