Can I use HDRMerge for focus stacking?
anyone here already did it?
I donāt think thatās going to work. You can try GitHub - PetteriAimonen/focus-stack: Fast and easy focus stacking or GitHub - noah-peeters/ChimpStackr: free, multi-platform focus stacking software
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tks!!!
I am downloading and will try it. 
also, 'm very glad to find the community and exchange with you guys!!!
looking forward to enhance my knowledge and contribute !!!
cheers
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Welcome! Hope you find this place useful.
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I tried it on Linux, it just doesnāt work. The last version is from 2022.
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Iāve downloaded Chimp Stackr. a bit slow to get ready and open.
didnāt try yet, but as far as I read reviews in forums and YouTube, it seems quite powerful and delivers a very clean result. Also, you can always export TIFF or JPEG and enhance on Rawtherapee afterwards.
I could open it, I could start it - but then it crashed.
I also entered an issue on Github in june last year - no response.
On Linux they seem to have packaging problems, but last I saw it seemed to work on windows. Itād be awesome if the community could help them sort out their Linux issues 
I tried them both today on Linux, using 2 Mpx files exported from darktable, aligned using align_image_stack. Neither of them crashed.
From 20 files they both created a stacked image. image-stacker have results very similar to my previous attempt with enfuse (not so great). Chimp was much better.
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Thanks for the hint. Chimp Stackr worked perfectly!!!
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Which distribution do you use? (Iām curious)
I use Manjaro and, as I wrote already, ChimpStackr crashes.
Iām on Ubuntu 24.10. ChimpStacker does nothing (does not crash, but does not stack images, either) if Nvidia CUDA is installed, but works fine on the CPU.
I tested Chimpstacker under Mint 22.1, and it works well (AMD GPU integrated). On the other hand, it leaves a halo, a problem I already had with hugin.
I have installed ChimpStacker with AppImage
The photo is a 100% crop where I compare with ZereStacker.
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Then we must continue to improve chimpstackr. Zerene is known to be excellent, but is not FOSS, so.
āfocus-stackā should be tested also
I agree, ZereneStacker isnāt FOSS, but when youāre exposing some of your stacked photos, youāre looking for the best tool to do it and, under Linux in my opinion, itās Zerene.
As Gimp allows you to align layers, it should normally be possible to do stacking. I havenāt tested it yet, but if anyone knows which blending mode to use for stacking in the Gimp, Iād love to hear from you.
I havenāt tested Focus-Stack because it passes through the terminal and itās not my thing.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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@kofa When you wrote āimage-stacker have results very similar to my previous attempt with enfuse (not so great)ā were you talking about āfocus-stackā? Can you post sample images with both focus-stack and ChimpStackr?
Hi, sorry about the slow reply. I donāt think this will be of help, but here it goes anyway.
Itās been a while, and I donāt normally shoot macro and stack images, it was just an event with my photo club. I did not use a tripod, these are hand-held sequences of photos, with lots of camera movement, which is, Iām quite certain, the root cause of the bad results.
I exported the individual frames from darktable as JPG; I then used some LLM to generate a Python script to run align_image_stack with various combinations of options (see focus2/align.py) and then to run enfuse with mixes of options (focus2/enfuse_aligned.py). Those created shell scripts all-opt.sh and enfuse-aligned.sh, respectively. The files ZS-DMap.jpg and ZS-PMax.jpg are from Zerene Stacker.
The directory focus3 is similar, but it has a file produced by Chimp, chimp-0-7.jpg.
focus1a also has JPGs and aligned TIF files, plus a Chimp output.
Iāll keep this share for a short while, not that I think itās worth anything: macro-stacking ā Google ŠŠøŃŠŗ
No idea why the link appears in Russian (Google āDiskā)
@jdchristensen, I guess the files are shared arenāt very useful. Iāll delete the share in a week to free up storage. If you do need me to keep them available for longer, please let me know.