Primary motivation for this feature is that last year's major update of macOS, to 10.15 "Catalina", broke BugSlabber. (The issue is that BugSlabber is a 32-bit application, and Catalina only allows 64-bit apps.)
Main limitations of the slabbing capability in Zerene Stacker are that there's no GUI yet to select DMap or to specify how or where the saved images are written. Those options are preset to be PMax, with 16-bit TIFF images saved inside the project, to the SavedImages folder. Contrary to appearances, changing the "Save in" setting that appears in the Batch Queue dialog will probably not change what the slabbing tasks actually do with their images. [Edited to add: these problems are fixed in the T2020-04-04-1104-beta, described below.]
To use the built-in slabbing, first proceed as usual to the point where you have loaded source files, aligned them, and saved a project.
Then instead of running Bugslabber and loading the script that it makes, do this:
- In the Zerene Stacker menu bar, click on Batch > Slabbing... to open the Slabbing panel of the Preferences dialog.
- In the Slabbing panel, adjust the slab size and overlap as required.
- Click OK to close the Preferences dialog. This results in silently constructing a bunch of batch tasks to create the slices.
- In the menu bar, click on Batch > Show Batch Dialog. You should see one batch of tasks, one task per slab.
- Run All Batches
- Be sure that there's a checkmark on Options > Preferences > Preprocessing > "Add files to existing project as already aligned".
- Look into the SavedImages subfolder of the project.
- Select the slab outputs,.
- Drag those into the Zerene Stacker Input Files List.
Edited to add: I've just now noticed that the above workflow will not work correctly if you have selected any of Pre-rotation, Pre-cropping, or Pre-sizing, at Options > Preferences > Preprocessing. That's because the slab outputs will already have those transformations applied to them, and loading them as inputs will result in a mismatch between the original sources and the slab outputs. This same restriction has always applied, but I was not aware of it. I consider it to be a long-standing bug, to be fixed at some time in the future. But for the moment, the only way to handle slab outputs that have been generated with any of the Pre-transformations is to load them into a new project with those transformations turned off.
Feedback solicited, of course.
--Rik
[Edit: March 30, 2020, 8 PM my time, to document problems.]
[Edit: April 4, 2020, 3:30 PM my time, to provide more realistic title per new beta described below.]