Helicon Soft Helicon Focus Pro (Download, Lifetime License)

Helping to extend your depth of field by compositing numerous exposures together, Helicon Focus Pro from Helicon Soft is a focus stacking program offering refined and intuitive controls to benefit macro shooting applications as well as landscape, tabletop, and nearly any other kind of controlled photographic scenario. The basic premise of the software requires you to make sequential photographs from a fixed position at varying focus distances, and then the software will automatically combine the images into a single file in order to generate greater depth of field than is possible with a single exposure. An unlimited number of images can be used within each focus stack and both advanced algorithms and interpolation methods are applied to ensure a high degree of clarity and detail, as well as retain an overall natural appearance. A unique Raw-in-DNG-out process maintains the editing capabilities of a raw file after the stacking process and integrated smart retouching brushes let you refine the look of processed stacks. The software supports 16-bit color depth files, as well as the ability to batch process multiple stacks automatically, and it can be seamlessly integrated within existing editing workflows via a dedicated Adobe Lightroom plug-in or using command line protocols for use with other applications. Imagery can also be exported to Helicon 3D Viewer to generate a virtual 3D rendering of an image, or multiple frames can also be composited into a stitched panorama for wide-field imagery. Additionally, this Pro version also includes the desktop version of Helicon Remote to supported tethered shooting with select Canon and Nikon DSLRs from a Mac or Windows computer.