And update of FocusFusion is now available in the Windows Store.

The detailed list fo changes can be found in the changelog. As a quick summary, this version (and the 1.2 just before it) focused on rendering quality.

There were multiple optimizations under the hood which were all “spent” on improved filtering, focus measure and stacking. Overall, the rendering speed is still in the same ballpark (fast!)

The alignment accuracy was boosted to improve handling of higher resolution shots, especially with lots of out of focus areas. In other words: alignment can now often succeed even when whole shots are blurry.

The focus measure and fusion where refined in order to both better preservation of fine details, and produce a smoother result for areas where none of the shots are in focus.

Brightness and color normalization were added and are active by default. My first trials where on stacks with all parameters on “manual”, and no variations. Obviously, when that’s not the case, brightness and color balance are adjusted between shots by the cameras, and that resulted in “splotches” when not corrected during stacking.

There is also a pass of noise filtering for resilience to high ISO shots and hot pixels. Note that this filtering is only for the focus measure: original noise is preserved as much as possible in the fusion, so you have control over the actual filtering.

Finally was also stressed on stacks of 100+ shots of 40 Megapixels image. Needless to say those large stacks currently require quite a bit of memory… That will hopefully be mitigated in the next version 🙂