Before I begin to describe this new version of CombineZ, I would like to thank the many people who have written to me in the past with words of encouragement, bug reports, suggestions, and success stories, some even including samples of their work. Without this encouragement I might have given up long ago.
I would also like to offer a special thank you to Rik Littlefield who made some valuable suggestions for the algorithms to use in this new version, and John Hollenberg who has made many suggestions to improve the user interface and other feature requests which have improved the program's usability considerably. And even more thanks to Rik for reading through the docs, correcting some of my typos and pointing out some hard to follow parts which I hope I have improved sufficiently.
All of the coding and the final decision on what to include is down to me, so any shortcomings in these departments are mine.
Remember this program is issued under a GNU Public License. You may use it and modify the code under the terms of this license.
Please send any suggestions and bug reports to me.
The purpose of CombineZ is to increase depth of focus by combining pictures that you have taken. Each picture should be in focus at a different depth into the scene. It makes life easier if they have been taken at regular intervals, though this condition is not essential.
When performing most of the major operations, you will notice the Progress dialog box appears, then disappears when the operation finishes. If you wish to see the Progress box at any other time press F2. The Cancel button in this box may not stop the operation immediately but will stop it at the next convenient point, from CombineZ's point of view.
The Standard Macros may be used as a quick way of getting results without having to understand much of the theory, and without getting involved in the details of the process.
CombineZ5 was developed from CombineZ4 but there are many changes. See Comparison with CombineZ4 for more information.
Each of the input pictures is called a Frame, and the collection of Frames is called a Stack. All of the Frames in a Stack must have the same width and height.
I have developed a Memory Management system which means the size of pictures that can be processed has increased dramatically, but there is still a limit. The amount of memory you have in your computer is the limiting factor. As a rough guide, take your computer's RAM in megabytes, subtract 200, then divide by 50. This is the approximate maximum picture size the program can handle in megapixels, but things slow down when you approach the limit.
There are two different ways to combine the Frames to produce a finished picture. The simplest but least powerful is The Average and Filter Method. This is the best method to use in certain circumstances, notably when there are strongly contrasting features that rapidly come into and out of focus in the same position. But generally speaking, the more complex method Stacking is the best one to use.
They are facts of a photographer's life that as you focus on a subject its size appears to vary, the camera will move, the subject will move, and the lighting will not stay constant. An important ability of any stacking program is to be able to make the frames Register, i.e. features should line up properly in the Stack. It is also necessary to have the average colour and brightness of all frames similar, to prevent patchy results in the Stacking method mentioned above. Preparation of the Frames for Stacking is thus an important consideration.
Once your Frames have been stacked, chances are there is still some room for improvement. Some people may wish to use a program they are familiar with to do this. There are various options available; see Importing and Exporting. On the other hand, CombineZ itself has several powerful editing tools that you may prefer to use, particularly to help the program avoid errors under some difficult conditions. See Editing Pixels and Rectangles.
Functions which alter the appearance of one Frame or need two frames to work can be found here: One and Two Frame functions.
An interesting addition to CombineZ5 is the ability to Filter Frames, the Sum of the Stack, or the Depthmap.
Finally once you find a method that works for you, you can incorporate it into a Macro. Actually Macros are more powerful than that, they can help in the search for a method by automatically producing several outputs for you to compare.