Combine ZM

A forum to ask questions, post setups, and generally discuss anything having to do with photomacrography and photomicroscopy.

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DaveW
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Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 4:29 am
Location: Nottingham, UK

Combine ZM

Post by DaveW »

I was looking to see if it was worth downloading Combine ZM for doing small stacks, but there seem to be so many variations and bits and pieces to download, plus the following statement was made:-

"18th of April 2008

Unless there are bugs that need fixing this will be the last release of CombineZM. All of the bug fixes of recent months are included, plus a newly discovered one which caused a crash when tiny frames were loaded onto a computer with a lot of RAM (fixes include two bugs which caused soft/out of focus results and one which reduced the accuracy of the alignment routines). The Do Soft Stack macro is included in the standard set to further improve the programs performance with large e.g. 10M Pixel pictures. The Options dialog allows you to reserve some RAM for movie making etc., and contains a switch to prevent Help from being shown on first starting the program. The zipped Visual C++ Workspace file is now up to date. Development will not stop here ... watch out for the new version to appear later this year."


See:-

http://hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZM/News.htm

Therefore what do I need to download to start from scratch, or would I be best to wait until the new version comes out later in the year as I am in no real hurry? I am obviously not interested in movie making so would it be a version without this? I am running Vista Home Premium with 4 Gig of RAM so would the program be OK for this as Vista is not mentioned?

Not being a computer buff I need something simple to use and download.

DaveW

rjlittlefield
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Joined: Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:34 am
Location: Richland, Washington State, USA
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Post by rjlittlefield »

There's probably no advantage in waiting.

What you want is the full installer, http://www.hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co. ... ZMFull.msi as linked on Alan's page. As best I can tell, that automatically brings with it the other bits needed by CombineZM that aren't already provided by Windows XP & Vista.

Alan has not told us exactly what will be in the new version, but historically what he has done is to add functionality within the same framework.

As to the part about "easy to use", see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/combinez/message/603 and the replies to it. CombineZM provides a lot of capability to tweak, but for most purposes it'll do good work with just a few mouseclicks.

--Rik

Charles Krebs
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Location: Issaquah, WA USA
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Post by Charles Krebs »

I'm with Rik... get what's there now. As he said, it can be extremely simple to use or (if you want to tinker :wink: ) rather complex.

When you first start it up and look through the various drop down menus it can look daunting and unfamiliar, but the basic operation with the default parameters is simple and works well.

One nice thing about CombineZ is that, unlike some software, it's not like "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" when you install it on a computer. It just sits there in its own folder and doesn't mess with other programs or the registry. So if/when there are major changes made in the future it's a very simple matter to uninstall it.

DaveW
Posts: 1702
Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 4:29 am
Location: Nottingham, UK

Post by DaveW »

Thanks Rik and Charles.

By the way you extreme stackers, the curious blue eyes on these would make for one of your interesting stacks?

http://www.tipf.org.uk/forums/index.php?showtopic=5178

DaveW

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