Focus Stacking Software Focus Stacking Software

Download Focus Stacking Software for Macro and Product Shots

Focus Stacking Software merges a bracketed series into one image that is sharp from the nearest hair to the far edge, then softens the background behind it. Built for macro, coins, jewelry and small product work on Windows 10 and 11.

   
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Focus Stacking Software Screenshot.
A macro lens at f/5.6 gives you a sliver of sharpness, maybe a millimeter deep. So you shoot the same subject twenty or fifty times, moving the focus a little each time, and every frame ends up sharp in a different place. SoftOrbits Focus Stacking Software lines those frames up and keeps the sharp part of each one, so what comes out is a single picture with the whole subject in focus.
One frame of the series - only one plane is in focus.
The same twelve frames merged - the whole flower is sharp.

Here is what it looks like in practice. A carabid beetle on a rail, 60 frames at f/4, from the tip of the mandible to the back of the elytra. The merge takes those 60 slivers and hands you one beetle. That is the whole job, and it is why people who shoot small things keep software for focus stacking on the machine.

How to download and use the Focus Stacking Software

Install it.

1. Install it

1. Install it

Download the Focus Stacking Software and run the installer. It asks for Windows 10 or 11 on a 64-bit system. There is no 32-bit build and there will not be one: a deep series of high-resolution frames needs more address space than 32-bit process is able to give it.

Add the frames.

2. Add the frames

2. Add the frames

Press Open series... and pick the frames of one shoot: the dialog takes the whole selection at once, dozens of files. The list then shows every file that will go into the merge, in natural order, so you check it against your shooting notes before anything runs. One rule to know early: all frames of a series must be the same pixel size, and a stray shot of another size stops the run with a message naming the file.

Merge the stack.

3. Merge the stack

3. Merge the stack

Press Stack. Alignment runs first, the merge itself second, and the progress bar tells you which stage you are in. This is a good moment to set up the next specimen.

Check the edges, then save.

4. Check the edges, then save

4. Check the edges, then save

The merged image opens at full size. Zoom to 100% and scroll along the thin parts: antennae, leg tips, a wire prong on a ring setting. That is where a bad stack shows itself first. Then save it under a name you will still recognize in six months.

Why it holds up on a real stack

Memory you can predict.

Memory you can predict

The complaint about big stacks is always the same one. The app slows down. It uses RAM in a way nobody can explain, and then it dies somewhere in middle of a two-hour job. Here the arithmetic is boring and public. Memory use follows the resolution of a single frame, roughly 200 MB per megapixel, and the number of frames in the series does not move it. We measured the same shoot at 47 frames and at 53 frames; both sat at about 633 MB. If the first minute did not run you out of memory, the last one will not either.

   
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You see the result first, then decide

Trials in this corner of the market have a habit to hide their limit until the very end. You wait out the merge, reach for Save, and only then learn that the free run quietly shrank your picture. This one behaves differently. The finished render sits on your screen at full resolution, and no watermark is painted across it. What the unregistered version will not do is save that render to your drive, and you know it before you start, not after an hour at the rail.

   
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You see the result first, then decide.
Minutes on a plain CPU.

Minutes on a plain CPU

A series that takes half an hour to merge is a series people quietly stop shooting. Seventy-four frames of a six-megapixel series merged in about a minute and a half on our test desktop, with no graphics card in the machine at all. Bigger frames cost more time, roughly in step with the megapixels, and RAW costs more again because every frame has to be decoded first.

   
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The background does not have to stay sharp

Stacking has a side effect nobody warns you about. Everything comes out sharp, so the twig behind the beetle and the shelf behind the coin are as crisp as the subject, and the picture reads flat. The usual answers are to open the aperture and lose the depth you shot the series for, or to mask the background by hand in an editor afterwards. Here the distance is already known: the frames were taken from near to far, so the frame a pixel came from is how far away it sits. One slider softens what is behind the subject, and the sharp part stays exactly as the merge made it, original pixels and all sixteen bits. On a seventeen-megapixel result it takes about two and a half seconds.

   
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The background does not have to stay sharp.

Two ways to merge

Detail is the default. It works on wavelet coefficients and holds fine texture: scales on a wing, the milling on a coin rim. Smooth is the other one. It builds a depth map across the series and blends by it, with a Radius setting that trades sharpness for calm. At Radius 3 the result keeps roughly four fifths of what Detail gives you, at Radius 32 about half. Both are one click apart, so running a difficult series twice costs nothing but time.

Alignment is built in

Frames drift. Racking focus changes magnification a little, a rail creeps, a finger nudges the tripod head. Alignment runs before the merge, in two stages, matching each frame to its neighbor instead of to single reference, on an ECC criterion with an affine model. It covers the scale and shift you get from focus breathing. What it does not do is rescue a subject that moved on its own.

Whole folders in one pass

Switch the focus stacking program to the mode where each subfolder is its own series and point it at the folder that holds them all. A night of shooting, forty specimens in forty folders, comes back as forty separate stacks, without you clicking through them one at a time. The unregistered version stacks the first folder and shows it, so the quality is visible before the license.

RAW in, 16-bit TIFF out

RAW files go in as they are. DNG, CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, ORF and RW2 are decoded by LibRaw into linear 16-bit data before the merge starts, so there is no convert-everything-first step and no second program in the chain. Ordinary JPEG and PNG files are read as well, TIFF too. On the way out you get 16-bit TIFF when you want the headroom for levels and local contrast, JPEG or PNG when you do not.

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Runs on your PC

The installer is 18.4 MB. There is no neural model in it and no Python runtime. OpenCV, LibRaw and the image codecs are linked in statically, and that is the whole thing. Your frames are read from your disk and written back to your disk. Museum and lab material often cannot leave the building at all. For that kind of work it is a requirement.

Stop a run any time

Cancel does what it says. We stopped a 74-frame run halfway through the merge. The job came back cancelled, the 849 MB it had taken went back to 46 MB, and the window was still there with the file list intact. Nothing to restart, nothing to reopen.

Push the background back out of focus

A stack is sharp everywhere by definition, and that includes the twig behind the beetle. The subject stops standing out and the photo reads flat. The merge has already measured how far every pixel sits, so softening what is behind the subject costs nothing extra: one slider for the amount, one for how much of the depth stays sharp, and a choice between a lens look that swells bright points into round highlights and a plain soft one. Apply blur recomputes from the clean merge every time, so the slider goes back and forth without mush piling up, and the sharp part of the picture comes back as the original pixels.

Focus Stacking Software
Focus Stacking SoftwareDownload the Focus Stacking Software, load a bracketed series, and look at the merged result on screen before you decide anything.
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Who needs Focus Stacking Software

Insect and specimen photographers

Anything with legs, antennae or a mounted pin takes thirty to a hundred frames before it looks like a specimen and not like a blur with one sharp band across it. This is macro photography software first. Rail, tripod, small apertures, long series. Collection records and field guides live on exactly these stacks.

Coin and collectible sellers

A coin shot at any angle has maybe a third of its surface in focus, and the buyer decides on the picture. Grading detail, die cracks, the edge lettering, all of it has to be readable on one image. Fifteen frames on a copy stand and a merge is a shorter route there than any lighting trick.

Product and jewelry photographers

A ring on a black acrylic sheet is a stacking problem whether you call it that or not. The prongs are near, the far edge of the band is not, and a client will notice. Photo stacking software solves the depth half of it. The light is still your problem. Watches, tools, anything with a deep front-to-back shape, same thing.

Formats it reads and writes

One short table, so you know before you download whether your camera files go in as they are.

FormatExtensionsReadWritten
RAW.DNG, .CR2, .CR3, .NEF, .ARW, .ORF, .RW2Yes, decoded by LibRawNo
TIFF.TIF, .TIFFYesYes, 16 bits per channel
JPEG.JPG, .JPEGYesYes
PNG.PNGYesYes
BMP.BMPYesNo
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Focus Stacking Software

Focus Stacking Software

Languages
File Size

18.4 Mb

Version

1.0

Last updated on

16/06/26

$ 19.99

🖥️ System Requirements

  • Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7 (32/64 bit)
  • Intel i3, AMD Ryzen 5 or above
  • 4 GB of RAM or above
  • NVIDIA® GeForce® series 8 and 8M, Intel® HD Graphics 2000, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600, AMD Radeon™ R600, Mobility Radeon™ HD 4330, Mobility FirePro™ series, Radeon™ R5 M230 or higher graphics card with up-to-date drivers
  • 1280 × 768 screen resolution, 32-bit color
  • 1 GB of free hard disk space or above

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

Add the frames, press Stack, save the result. The longer version goes like this. Shoot the series on a tripod or a rail with the exposure locked, then load the whole set at once and leave Detail selected the first time. Look at the merged image at 100% before you save it. If the thin edges look wrong, run it again on Smooth with Radius around 8 and compare the two.

Usually yes. At 1:1 with a macro lens at f/8 the zone in focus is well under a millimeter, and stopping down further loses you sharpness to diffraction faster than it buys you depth. Flat subjects shot straight on, a leaf or a stamp or a printed page, are fine in one frame. Anything with volume is not.

It depends on whether the subject has depth and whether anyone will look closely. For a listing photo, a specimen record or a catalog shot, a merged image is the difference between the object being documented and the object being suggested. For a quick reference snapshot, one frame on a small aperture will do. The real cost is the shooting time on the rail, not the merge.

Yes, up to the point of saving. The merge runs, the result opens, and a license is what writes that file to disk. And yes, free focus stacking software does exist. Most of it is command-line only, with no interface at all. If you are comfortable in a terminal it is a fair option, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Enough that the sharp zones overlap. In practice that is fifteen to forty frames for a coin or a small product, and sixty to a hundred or more for a whole insect at high magnification. Overlap matters more than the count: fifty frames with generous overlap beat eighty taken by careless jumps.

A general editor can align layers and blend them, and for five frames of a landscape that is fine. Dedicated image stacking software is a different kind of tool at forty or a hundred frames. Its merge method is built for that many, and it never asks you to assemble a layer stack by hand. That is a workflow difference, not a small one.

Because every RAW frame has to be decoded before anything else can happen to it, and on our measurements that decode takes 47 to 67 percent of the whole run. A single 17-megapixel DNG occupies around 100 MB once it has been expanded in memory. Nothing is broken on your machine. Shooting the series as JPEG is a legitimate choice when the result is going on a listing page rather than into an archive.

You need a tripod or a focus rail. A hand-held burst will not come out clean, and version 1 has no feature-based alignment to rescue one. That is an honest limit and not a setting you have missed. In the field, on a subject that will not sit still, stacking is often the wrong tool anyway and one frame at a smaller aperture is the right one.

Because behind an antenna or a leg tip the background is sharp in some frames and blurred in others, and the merge has to choose. Every tool in this class has the problem, ours included. Smooth with a larger Radius softens it, and so does shooting with more overlap. Whatever is left after that gets retouched by hand in your editor, because version 1 has no retouch brush.

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit only. For frames in the 24 to 45 megapixel range, 8 GB of RAM is the sensible floor. For RAW series, 16 GB and an SSD holding the source folder will help you more than a faster processor does.

Yes, and without masking anything by hand. Background blur sits at the bottom of the same panel and works from the depth map the merge builds anyway: the frames were shot from near to far, so the number of the frame a pixel came from is its distance. Set how much blur you want, set how much of the depth stays sharp, and pick Lens if bright points should swell into round highlights the way a fast lens does. One honest limit. Where the background was out of focus in every single frame of the series, there is nothing to measure depth from and the software is guessing there. Shoot the series so it covers the background as well, and that case does not come up.

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  • Windows 7
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  • Windows 10
  • Windows 11
Author: SoftOrbits (English)
Avg. rating: 4.5 from 852 votes
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