CombineZP vs wxHexEditor

CombineZP is a Windows focus-stacking program that combines focused regions from multiple photographs into an image with greater depth of field. Its documented methods include Do Stack and Pyramid Maximum Contrast. It provides quick and thorough image alignment, with rotation correction in thorough alignment. Batch processing can stack images, and users can adjust memory use for image sets that demand more from the computer. Macro parameters are editable for additional control over close-up stacking. JPEG is the documented output format. The program is free and the repository identifies its license as GPL-3.0. The repository preserves code originally created by Alan Hadley and shared under the GPL; it contains CombineZ5 and combineZP directories, a README, a license file, and an installer. The README refers to a compiled Windows x86 version 1.0, updated January 27, 2012, in a file named combinezp.msi. The repository says it is kept for posterity, lists no published releases, and a microscopy tools page describes the software as not maintained. Windows is the listed platform; a third-party microscopy tools page also says it works with Wine on Linux.

wxHexEditor is a free hex and disk editor for examining and changing binary data, with a particular focus on large files on Linux. It uses 64-bit file descriptors and supports files or devices up to 2^64 bytes. The site reports about 25 MB of memory use with multiple files larger than 8 GB open, without copying the whole file into RAM. You can insert or delete bytes without creating a temporary file, compare binary files and merge nearby results, and use its integrated x86 disassembly. It can open devices on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X for disk and sector editing; raw sector editing can be used to work on partition tables and filesystems or recover data. Other tools include many encodings, checksum functions, XOR operations, color tags, and saving selections as dump files. Downloads are listed for Linux, Mac Intel, and Win32. The latest release event listed on the home page is version 0.24 Beta, dated December 31, 2017. The site’s supported languages are English, Turkish, and partially Russian.