focus-stack vs Shine Stacker

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.

Shine Stacker combines images captured at different focus distances to produce images with extended depth of field. It is intended for microscopy, macro photography, and computational imaging. The software offers Laplacian pyramid and depth map stacking methods, with automatic alignment, color or luminosity balancing, noisy pixel masking, vignetting correction, and final filters. For retouching, users can select details from individual frames to address dust, ghosts, and artifacts. Batch workflows can divide many frames into smaller groups before merging them into one focused image. Python batch processing and Jupyter notebook scripting are supported. Shine Stacker supports RAW files and lists TIFF, JPEG, and multilayer TIFF as output formats. It is open source under the LGPL-3.0 license and free to download. The listed platforms are Windows, macOS, Linux, and API. The maker offers a GitHub download and Python installation through PyPI with pip.