

The hairs on this bumblebee queen would have been a nightmare without using slabbing to separate them out. Slabbing seemed such an obvious benefit that I adopted it very early on in my workflow, and it has helped a lot in gaining encouraging stacking results.

The sheer existence of these utilities alone sets Zerene Stacker above its competitor, Helicon Focus.Ī slabbed focus stack with Zerene Stacker. Use ZereneVS, Slabberjockey, BugSlabber or MakeSubStackingScript ( Windows | Mac ) to generate your substacks.

These utilities take some time to understand but what they do is write the Zerene Stacker batch job that will create the slabs for you. Manual slabbing is a time consuming and fiddly addition to the standard stack but there are some great utilities to speed up the process for you. It is not a technique that is normally neccessary but if the result is poor then it may helf distinctify hairs in front of each other so as to make the final stack more accurate. Slabbing is a useful tool when used in conjunction with retouching, but by itself it is not a panacea for poor technique or other issues. Substack slabbing is the recognised technique to solve some of the most common challenges that come with focus stacking macro images.
