FOCUS projects 4 professional vs OpenFocus

FOCUS projects 4 professional is a standalone FRANZIS application for creating macro photographs with extended depth of field. Its HQ stacking uses 64-bit calculation, Focus-Boost technology increases sharpness, and stacks can contain up to 1,000 focus planes. The software advertises precise alignment and includes automatic alignment, batch processing and manual retouching. It supports RAW input and outputs RAW, TIFF, JPEG and other formats, with a bracketed HDR merge mode. An Adobe Lightroom plug-in is included. FRANZIS lists the application for Mac OS X 10.7 and Windows 10, 8.1, 8 and 7; the product page also presents it for macOS and Windows. The full version is an immediately available download, and a demo version is linked. The listed Vollversion plan costs €20 as a one-time purchase, with an offer price of €20,00 including VAT and a stated UVP of €99,00. The pricing note says from €69. There is no free plan, but a free trial is available. FRANZIS describes its photography products as suitable for beginners and professionals.

OpenFocus aligns and fuses multi-focus image sequences to create images with focus throughout. It offers ECC and Homography alignment and several fusion methods: Guided Filter, DCT, DTCWT, GFG-FGF and the StackMFF V4 AI model. A wipe view lets users compare source frames with results, and the software can generate depth maps showing focus position per pixel. It supports folder-based batch processing and a headless command-line interface for scripting and CI. Listed inputs include JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, MP4 and numbered image folders; the manual also describes decoding additional video formats. Outputs include those image formats, image-sequence folders and GIF animations. Research functions include metadata-calibrated scale bars and multi-page TIFF stacks that preserve 16-bit depth. The interface supports English, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish, with automatic system-language detection. OpenFocus is free under the MIT License, though included algorithms may have separate license terms. Its Windows and macOS app builds are unsigned and may trigger SmartScreen or Gatekeeper warnings on first launch.