ZS vs PS CS5, part 2

[John Koerner]

Admin edit, 10/27/2011: This topic was originally an extension of Image comparison of ZS and PS CS5 on deep high mag stacks. Due to the significant shift in content and style, we've split the following discussion into its own thread, while crosslinking the two to maintain continuity and preserve the validity of external links if any. The topic continues below, beginning with comments by John Koerner.

--Rik (rjlittlefield)

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John Koerner...

I was bothered by a number of elements in that fellow's tirade. Among them, that he referred to Zerene Stacker as a $300 program. Sure, it's $290 for professional use, but I'll bet the great majority of users are paying $40 (students) or $90 (non-pros). And Zerene Stacker is by no means crippled at these lower price points.

Hi Chris;

Tirade? What I wrote wasn't a tirade, it only served to illustrate examples of what I experienced within the parameters of my test. I also know of multiple fine art photographers who have had similar issues with Zerene mismanaging colors on high-density files.

By contrast, it has been established that Photoshop CS5 has its own troubles handling deep, high-magnification stacks: 1) taking forever to process them and 2) making more errors than Zerene when asked to handle a huge workload.

Therefore, which product is "best" all depends on the kind of photography one is doing: super-deep stacks at high magnification (but with little color to manage) or smaller stacks where deep, rich color rendition is what's most desired.

And I wrote of a $290 program because the article was intended to reflect the full gamut, and maximum cost, of each edition.

A few of the "faster workflow" capabilities are available only under the pro license, but all of the "quality output" features are there even under the cheapest license.

Well, I guess it all boils down to honesty then. If I were to purchase the Zerene product (and I may well at some point), it would be as a professional who intends to sell his work ... same as I payed over $2,500 to get the full Adobe Master Collection CS5, rather than try to skate with the much less expensive "student" version.

His test seems to start with bad photography and a demand that some magic wand will correct it for him. But most stacking photomacrographers want to step through boundaries that even good photography has heretofore not able to cross. So the guy just doesn't get it. From his findings, all I can learn is that if someone wishes to make precisely the same mistakes he does, his findings might apply. Sheesh.

Well, I am sorry you don't like my photography. If you read the article, I purposely took shots that would be "hard" for any stacker to handle precisely to see how they'd handle them.

I would love to see some of your own photography, so that I could know what "good" photography looks like.

The only thing I don't "get" is your hostile attitude to my experiments. I do understand fanboyism makes people act funny sometimes, and if you are a fan of Zerene and didn't like my conclusions, that's fine. But why the hostility and insults?

Photoshop stacking vs. Zerene Stacker stacking is like Yugo vs. Ferrari.

Actually, Photoshop CS5 is the very expensive Ferrari, that most people cannot afford, while Zerene is a useful (but much more limited) program that is within most people's affordable reach.

But even if the two programs were equal, the support that comes with Zerene Stacker would make it an easy buy. On behalf of Fortune 500 companies, I've been involved in multi-million dollar software purchases. Did my clients ever get the kind of support Rik gives? No way, not ever. Not long ago, I made a suggestion to Rik for an "N'th frame" stacking feature, as a help in determining optimal movement increments. I've come to expect incredible support from Rik, but was still blown away when, that very day, he sent me a link to a beta version of Zerene Stacker he had altered to add this capability. That very day. And it worked great. Now, a few weeks later, that feature, among others, has been rolled out without fanfare, in an updated release at no cost to licensed Zerene Stacker users. Anybody think this would happen with Photoshop?

This is an outstanding point you have made, and I couldn't agree with you more: the level of support Rik puts out is unparalleled and deserves extreme loyalty, no doubt.

Too kind, Rik. As The Bard said: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I am pretty sure sure you wouldn't have the gonads to be speaking this way to me if we were face-to-face, and I am even more certain that you'd immediately regret it if you did.

That said, I have insulted no one in my article, and I mean to insult no one here, so IMO you owe me an apology for your insults.

If my article contained errors or omissions, they were purely accidental, but if it provided any truths about the strengths/weaknesses of each program, then we will all be better off.

Jack


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[John Koerner]

I personally believe that most people of the caliber that would be significantly interested in a demanding specialty like focus stacking, would quickly judge that an irrational review is not worth paying much attention to. One has to constantly sort out disinformative reviews from informative ones in today's Internet-based society.
Yet newcomers might not be able to tell the difference, but even newbies could save themselves from such a mistake if they simply look around the various macro forums and note that the major stacking software in use doesn't usually use Photoshop except for manually constructed, low-image-count stacks (typically created from a handful of hand-held field macro photos, not CS5's automated stacking). Yet I notice that Lord V seems to use Zerene for many or perhaps most of his hand-held field stacks.
Perhaps people with experience in creating high-quality stacks (studio or hand-held) should reply more frequently, especially at other forums where disinformative reviews and opinions are sometimes promulgated without much rebuttal. I'd hate to see too many people begin to use an inadequate solution for stacking software without understanding what they are missing.
Unfortunately, on other forums such "discussions" too often degenerate into flame wars, etc. I suspect this is why many informed people don't always comment specifically and critically when strongly expressed but disinformative reviews and comments are posted (on other forums). Yet if informed opinion is not presented effectively and regularly, uninformed opinion may sway much opinion, at least for a while. Just consider current US politics! This concern is worrisome to me.
Fortunately, photomacrography.net is such a very valuable refuge, source of knowledge, and a haven for macro and micro photographic enthusiasts, due in no small part to sustained efforts by Rik and others. Thanks for everyone's ongoing efforts!
Perhaps a group of us should informally get together and draft a jointly signed reply at other macro forum(s) when a significant but disinformative review is posted? This is how journals handle such issues, with respect to published articles or reviews, etc. Just a thought.
In an ideal world, author(s) of inadequate reviews comparing CS5 and Zerene, etc, would read this thread and (peacefully) help everyone reach a better-informed state of knowledge. Such a goal does require that everyone be reasonably knowledgeable, in basic agreement as to how to credibly compare software and image quality, or at least educable and well-intentioned.
In any event, I found Rik's comparison testing to be very informative and very credible, but not surprising (which is a good thing in this context!).
I hope my two cents/two Euros are helpful.
Disclosure: I own both Zerene and Photoshop CS5.

This is a reasonable statement.

If my review was "inadequate" in some respects, then civil and respectful discussion can be generated as to how and why. I don't see the need for insults.

Rik's own tests listed here are inadequate in their own way, as they involve very deep stacks of subjects without much color or dynamic range to them, nor was any mention made if they were handled in the ProPhoto Color Space, as 16-bit .tiff, either, or mere 8-bit files in the sRGB color space.

The results of rendering the simple geometry of a 150-stack image of fly's eyes, with no real background color, performed on 8-bit .jpgs in the sRGB color space, may not be the same as the results of a 10-image stack with vivid color and high dynamic range, rendered in .tiff form, at 16-bit, in the ProPhoto color space.

These types of experiments and comparisons should be conducted without bias, and with the object of helping the user, not with the desire to attack or undermine anyone.

Jack


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[Eric F]

John Koerner wrote:

I am pretty sure sure you wouldn't have the gonads to be speaking this way to me if we were face-to-face, and I am even more certain that you'd immediately regret it if you did.

Wow! That says quite enough for me. Jack: disappear from Photomacrography.net!

Eric

[John Koerner]

Wow! That says quite enough for me. Jack: disappear from Photomacrography.net!
Eric

Hi Eric;

You seem to be unable to distinguish between an attack and a response to an attack. Let me remind you that I never said anything bad to Chris at all, but that he attacked me unprovoked.

Perhaps if someone called 'you' an IDIOT on a public forum, you might likewise be inclined to remind that person that he is only doing so because he is is a comfortably-safe distance away from you (or perhaps you have no gonads or manhood of your own and are inclined to take unprovoked verbal abuse like this from people).

Either way, the original insult did not come from me, it came from Chris, and it would be my own opinion that those who unfairly initiate insults and verbal abuse to other forum members are the ones who should be removed.

But of course this is up to moderator discretion,

Jack


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[rjlittlefield]

Hello, this is your Admin speaking. There will be no further personal attacks, or I'm going to get grouchy.

To put this in perspective, my teenage son once described me to his friends as "Enormously patient, but fierce when provoked." I had to admit, that was a pretty accurate description.

Jack is new here, so he doesn't have much practice with our conventions.

To quickly summarize, here at photomacrography.net, we try to maintain a collegial atmosphere with writings that conform to scientific style: state what was done, what happened, and what we think it means -- cautiously and appropriately qualified -- and then if future information changes things, we document the change and cross-reference it with the original postings.

It's really quite an unusual style, compared to what's done in the rest of the world. I like it a lot and I'm very pleased it's what the community here has adopted.

Thank you. Admin out.

[rjlittlefield]

Jack, I suspect that Chris's comments stem from his background as a reviewer of scientific work at the national award level. He's used to rigorous work and vigorous discussions. His words were more provocative than is customary for the forum, but I have to agree with the essence of his opinion.

As I've written in your thread at Photography on the Net,

At the risk of being blunt, your conclusions are founded in beginner mistakes followed by incorrect inferences. The initial error of shooting in random order is perfectly understandable, though it is also so unusual that I didn't think to ask about it. However, this error completely prevents Zerene Stacker from being used in a way that meets your evaluation criteria. Your observations about color and bokeh stem from the way that you did use it, which was simply not correct for preserving those aspects.

You may remember that I emailed to you on August 14, letting you know about the issue with focus point order, and again on August 27 as follows:

Let me summarize what I've noticed so far, and you can decide if and how you'd like to move forward.

1. You're shooting short stacks at low magnification, with a lot of out-of-focus background.

2. You care about bokeh, noise, and faithful reproduction of colors and contrasts, but losing detail doesn't seem to bother you.

3. You want a one-click user interface, with no need to configure any controls or workflow to match your subject material.

If these conditions accurately reflect your priorities, then by all means you should stick with Photoshop. Zerene Stacker is designed for people who simply want the best images they can get with some reasonable effort and who will happily learn whatever process they need to accomplish that goal. It is not designed to be a one-click solution for stacks like you're testing with. You may at some point encounter stacks that will cause you to reconsider the issues. If so, I'll be happy to resume the discussion.

In the meantime, I would be most grateful to see stated in your blog exactly what shooting and testing procedure you used. The fact that you shot randomly focused heaps is of critical importance to Zerene and Helicon regarding the bokeh, and I cannot find any mention of this point in your discussion. It would be nice also to see an explicit statement that you used out-of-the-box parameter settings and made no attempt to configure them for best results with your material. I appreciate your emphasis on fairness in the tests, and I'm sure that in pursuit of that goal you'll want to mention these confounding factors.

Nonetheless, as of this writing (almost 2 months later) I cannot find any of this information in your blog. So while I agree completely with your philosophy of helping the user, your blog's efforts in this regard do seem to be more than a bit deficient.

To answer your question, the stacks shown here were shot as 8-bit sRGB. That fact was not mentioned because it's not relevant to the aspects that are being shown. Internally, all stacks are processed in 32 bits per color, regardless of incoming file format.

--Rik

[John Koerner]

Jack, I suspect that Chris's comments stem from his background as a reviewer of scientific work at the national award level. He's used to rigorous work and vigorous discussions.

If Chris is used to dealing with intellectuals, then I am even more surprised by his adolescent tone. When a man talks to me like that, without provocation, I tend to want to put down my keyboard and deal with him directly. In this respect, I am used to a lot more than "vigorous discussions" with computer nerds, Rik, and I have a lot more "education" behind me than mere academia.

Still, having cooled-off, the truth is it is a waste of time to get worked up over wisecracks online; I was just surprised that such conduct would be found (and allowed to remain) here on this web forum, and it made me a little hot when I first read it.

His words were more provocative than is customary for the forum, but I have to agree with the essence of his opinion.

There was no other reason than lack of class to speak to me like that. If Chris doesn't like my opinion, that's fine, but his tone was out of line. In a community such as this, I don't know why people can't disagree with one another "vigorously," and yet still show some respect for each other. If you want to maintain a nice communtity, it has to start and end with mutual respect--even in disagreements.

As I've written in your thread at Photography on the Net,

At the risk of being blunt, your conclusions are founded in beginner mistakes followed by incorrect inferences. The initial error of shooting in random order is perfectly understandable, though it is also so unusual that I didn't think to ask about it. However, this error completely prevents Zerene Stacker from being used in a way that meets your evaluation criteria. Your observations about color and bokeh stem from the way that you did use it, which was simply not correct for preserving those aspects.

You forgot to include the part where you admitted that Zerene can't handle certain realities that Photoshop can, and here is my full response.

Let me summarize what I've noticed so far, and you can decide if and how you'd like to move forward.
1. You're shooting short stacks at low magnification, with a lot of out-of-focus background.

This is correct Rik: I like lots of color, lots of creamy bokeh--artistic shots pretty much.

2. You care about bokeh, noise, and faithful reproduction of colors and contrasts, but losing detail doesn't seem to bother you.

Correct, except the last part. Detail is vital to me also.

3. You want a one-click user interface, with no need to configure any controls or workflow to match your subject material.

For the stacking part, yes. I want to be able to "stack" my images with a click, and get an acceptable result, without having to spend hours fixing the imperfections. Honestly, who wants to spend hours doing this?

If these conditions accurately reflect your priorities, then by all means you should stick with Photoshop. Zerene Stacker is designed for people who simply want the best images they can get with some reasonable effort and who will happily learn whatever process they need to accomplish that goal. It is not designed to be a one-click solution for stacks like you're testing with. You may at some point encounter stacks that will cause you to reconsider the issues. If so, I'll be happy to resume the discussion.

I agree with this. The ultimate, overall usability of Photoshop is without equal, and while Zerene does have its uses where it shines very brightly within certain contexts (as I already discussed in the link to the other forum above), I have concluded that Photoshop handles my own style of photography best.

In the meantime, I would be most grateful to see stated in your blog exactly what shooting and testing procedure you used. The fact that you shot randomly focused heaps is of critical importance to Zerene and Helicon regarding the bokeh, and I cannot find any mention of this point in your discussion.

So you want me to go back and call my stacks "randomly-focused heaps," are you serious? Looks like a certain lack of respect is seeping out of you too. Interesting.

The fact is, I did state exactly what I did, and the other important fact is the files were in the same order for all the programs. And the most imortant fact of all is that you also described on the other forum why Photoshop handled them better.

You said,"The really tough cases are like yours, where the shooter is not able to hold to a single line of view, but instead the lens or the subject moves laterally from one frame to another. This causes perspective changes. The subject and background line up differently from one frame to another, and that makes things very difficult to align as you'd like. In this case, Zerene Stacker will attempt to line things up as best it can using only shift, translate, and scale, while Photoshop will fire up a larger arsenal including perspective and lens distortion. The additional degrees of freedom allow Photoshop to do a better job of keeping things lined up. However, neither tool really knows what parts of the image you care about, so the results are not necessarily what you'd like. Frequently people just give up trying to use automated methods to stack these, and resort to manual methods instead. This is another case where I'd give the nod to Photoshop, since it has a far wider range of painting and transformation tools than Zerene Stacker does."

And earlier you had previously said, "In this case you can expect to have some color shifts and noise accumulation as side effects of PMax. If those are not acceptable, then Photoshop would be the better tool as noted in my previous post."

These were the conditions under which I shot, Rik, and those were the results that obtained for me.

If you would like me to go back and discuss the conditions under which Zerene excels best, and Photoshop has trouble, I would be happy to do so.

It would be nice also to see an explicit statement that you used out-of-the-box parameter settings and made no attempt to configure them for best results with your material. I appreciate your emphasis on fairness in the tests, and I'm sure that in pursuit of that goal you'll want to mention these confounding factors.
Nonetheless, as of this writing (almost 2 months later) I cannot find any of this information in your blog. So while I agree completely with your philosophy of helping the user, your blog's efforts in this regard do seem to be more than a bit deficient.

I don't know how you can say this, Rik, when I gave you yourself an opportunity to run the images through your own program, and where I posted links to the results and then directly stated "your results were better than mine." How can I be any fairer than this? Yet the results still did not supass the Photoshop results.

If you'd like me to go back and discuss the conditions under which Zerene excels, I would be happy to do so.

To answer your question, the stacks shown here were shot as 8-bit sRGB. That fact was not mentioned because it's not relevant to the aspects that are being shown. Internally, all stacks are processed in 32 bits per color, regardless of incoming file format.
--Rik

Thanks for answering my question.

It is a pity that this exercise had to turn hostile, I don't think it needed to. Even if I am found to be in err in certain respects, this still could be handled better.

Have a good rest of the weekend,

Jack


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[ChrisR]

Jack I think you've misinterpreted, misquoted, omitted and wrongly concluded more about this subject than anyone I can remember ever has about anything on the forum. And in a rather antagonistic way, if I may say so.

Since you're rather dogmatic in your approach in spite of no longer having Zerene, perhaps you should indeed carry on using Photoshop. If you haven't paid for that either so it too expires, you can always use CombineZM; it will handle simple 3 image stacks such as you show us, perfectly well, and it's free.

If you come on to the point where you need those details ( yes in landscapes) which we've all seen Photoshop give up on, then you may wish to reconsider Zerene. I would urge though that you find out what you're doing with it before being judgemental. It is more demanding, but it all depends on your standards. If you chuck random images at ZS, you won't be doing it or yourself justice.

[rjlittlefield]

So you want me to go back and call my stacks "randomly-focused heaps," are you serious?

I was, two months ago when I wrote that. I assumed you would want to choose a less loaded phrase, although "heap" is the standard English word for a stack that has lost its order. But the fact remains that your choice of unordered focus ruled out getting a decent result from DMap, yet DMap is exactly what's needed to meet your criterion of smooth bokeh with colors et.al. exactly matching your input. If you want to beat up Zerene Stacker for requiring certain inputs or for being hard to use, that's certainly your privilege and I appreciate the feedback. However, to simply write that you ran your stacks and got certain results, without mentioning that they had been shot and processed so as to guarantee failure, does not strike me as responsible reporting.

I'm still not sure you really understand what I'm saying, so let me make an analogy. What you've done is roughly akin to saying "I tested three trucks: a Chevy, a GMC, and a Ford diesel. I put fuel in them all, and only the Ford ran decently!" without bothering to mention that you filled the gasoline tanks with diesel, and actually refusing to mention that even after the glitch was pointed out.

Even if I am found to be in err in certain respects, this still could be handled better.

No disagreement there. I appreciate the awkwardness of your situation. You started with an innocent mistake in using the products, then escalated it by misinterpreting the results, leading to complete mis-statements such as Zerene supposedly being unable to handle wide gamut color spaces. All this was publicly stated in strong terms and went unchallenged for several weeks, mainly because I didn't know about the POTN thread. But when all the pieces started coming together as shared knowledge, the flaws in your methods and conclusions became apparent to lots more people than myself. Now you're compounding the problem by apparently trying to bluster through, and that's just not going to work in either forum.

It keeps crossing my mind that this whole conversation has now been captured by the search engines and can be tripped over by anyone at any time, the same way I happened to find out about the POTN thread. Personally I'm comfortable with that. But you may not be, and in that case I'd suggest considering how you might handle future communications to keep this sort of thing from happening again.

If you'd like me to go back and discuss the conditions under which Zerene excels, I would be happy to do so.

Given the level of understanding and clarity that you've displayed to date, I don't think I'll accept that gracious offer. On the other hand, since the topic has already been thoroughly discussed in two other forums, I'll suggest (with tongue slightly in cheek) that you simply add a note to your blog entries that they have spawned a couple of vigorous discussions, and provide links to those discussions at POTN and here at photomacrography.net. The appropriate references would be http://photography-on-the.net/forum/sho ... ost1328502 and http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=14810.

Alternatively, and quite seriously, I'll suggest that you could just delete the two blog entries having to do with evaluations (HERE and HERE), and let the forum threads die quietly. There's really no shame in retracting a study that later turns out to have been corrupted by something or other. It's just like throwing a bad photo in the trash -- write it off as an educational experience and move forward. You're a good photographer; you know how to do that.

In any case, keep the very nice tutorial you wrote about how to do focus stacking in Photoshop. I found that to be very helpful in doing my own investigations -- far better in fact than any of the video tutorials I've watched on the topic.


One final technical issue...

Near the end of your blog entry, you write:

That said, what I find interesting is that Rik said his stacks were "untouched," yet there appears to be some pretty severe cropping of the top and right portion of the last image, compared to my own result.

Indeed, the results I sent you were straight from ZS, simply resized in Photoshop and saved out as 8-bit JPEG in sRGB. There was no retouching, and no manual cropping.

The difference in coverage is because by default ZS automatically crops to the area covered by the image with smallest FOV, while Photoshop outputs the area that is touched by any image in the set. Because FOV changes with focus, the area covered by Zerene's output will naturally be smaller. This behavior is described in the second Zerene Stacker tutorial, along with the caution that it's important to plan your stack so the area you care about is covered by all frames.

By the way, you might want to take a look at the links given in that section of your blog. When clicked, the last three all retrieve the same image, and it's not mine.

I hope this is helpful. Thank you for the further discussion.

--Rik

Edit, 10/25/2011 12:22 pm PST: I have locked this thread due to inactivity and pending Admin actions. Please PM me if you have questions about this.