FOCUS projects 4 professional vs PlaneFuse

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.

PlaneFuse is free focus-stacking software for macro, product, and landscape photography. It combines frames captured at different focus distances using PMax, DMap, weighted average, or Slab methods. Alignment options include translation, similarity, and perspective; it can reject poorly aligned frames and thin redundant brackets. For RAW stacks, it fuses frames from the same camera and sensor mode in scene-linear RGB and exports a re-editable Linear DNG. The process requires irreversible demosaicing. Its local browser workspace has deep zoom, source and result comparisons, a live histogram, and a reorderable job queue. Non-destructive retouching can work with source frames or results; exports include TIFF, PNG, JPEG, Linear DNG, and depth maps. NVIDIA CUDA and Apple MPS acceleration are supported, with CPU fallback and tiled processing if GPU memory runs out. PlaneFuse also offers command-line and local HTTP and WebSocket interfaces for scripting and batch work. Processing stays on the computer without uploading photos. The software is free for personal and commercial use; initial setup requires Node.js and uv.