PS operations still convoluted and tedious

On 01/06/2016 17:54, Rich A wrote:
Going though this whole process just to deal with one image. I remember using a program called Helicon Focus and it was pretty straightforward compared to this labour-intensive method.

http://www.dpreview.com/techniques/4...cking-tutorial

I've tried Helicon Focus, I've d/l a trial version of Zerene Stacker to
try out before deciding which I may purchase. I agree Helicon Focus was
quite straight-forward, I was quite happy with the results, some
artifacts that I needed to clone out, but I'm not sure if they were the
result of subject movement, focus breathing, or something else.
I also tried Combine Z (freeware / GPL) without much luck, it seemed
complex, I don't know if it's optimised to use multi-core CPUs, it
seemed to be abandonware since Windows XP, slow, and crashed out on my
Core i7 machine when running W7 Also I think it was limited to 8 bit
images, the commercial programs 16 bit (or can blend from raw files).
That's probably quite important as in the example on the DP Review
article, there's been a fair bit of colour adjustment - something I'd
really not want to do on each image before stacking, but after stacking
on a 16 bit output file.

I prefer not to use layers in Photoshop. That article shows why. OTOH
if doing work like that, then you're committed to a process where
precision is required in shooting, and a serious amount of time is going
to be needed in post-processing anyway - especially if the output format
will be print, not low-res web images.