Manual de Stacker

Finish

Finish is the creative step. Everything before it kept the pixels honest; here you decide how the photograph looks, what goes on it, and where it goes. The panel is built around a list of Layers, the way a photo editor’s is: the photograph, the print stamp and the share slides, each with its settings under the list when it is selected. The toolbar carries the view, the strip, history, Apply, the Identify · Subject pill, Export, Share and Publish. On this step the Images panel becomes the Exports panel, one card per thing you can export.

Before a stack exists the step says so: a single photograph unlocks Finish once it has developed; a bracket needs a stack first, because the finish chain runs on the fused and retouched result.

Layers

The list is the map of this step. Select a row and its settings open under the list; the eye at the left hides a layer; the lock at the right freezes an object’s position and size.

Undo and Redo on the toolbar walk through the edit history one change at a time. It is one history for Finish and Touch up together: every change to the layers, every look once its sliders come to rest (Develop), every run of the print chain (Print chain) and every brush stroke is a step, so Undo here can also take back the last stroke you painted, and Undo in Touch up can take back a look. The History section under the layer settings lists every step, newest first, with Session start at the bottom: click one to go straight to it. Steps after the one you are on are dimmed; a new change from there replaces them. Toggle last edit switches the newest change off and on again, for a quick before and after. The history is saved with the project (up to 200 steps) and comes back when it is opened; a project saved by an older version gets one step per brush stroke.

Develop: the look

Where editing belongs

Everything in this section is applied only when the picture is shown or exported. The stacked pixels never change, so a look can be set early, kept while you work, and adjusted at the end as often as you like. A science bundle never goes through a look, and the Linear render ignores one. The section’s summary beside its title says whether the look is adjusted or the profile’s own rendering is showing, and whether clipping is being shown on the picture.

Histogram, Auto, Reset, Clipping

The histogram shows the rendered picture’s tones on the display scale the export carries: red, green, blue and luma. A triangle at either end lights when more than one pixel in a thousand clips there; click it to show the clipped pixels on the picture, red where a channel clipped at white and blue where every channel is at black.

Auto sets exposure, whites and blacks from the picture: the median to middle grey within two stops, the extremes just inside the range. Everything else in the look stays. Reset returns to the profile’s own rendering.

Tip. Auto is the quickest honest start. Press it, look at the histogram, then adjust from there rather than from zero.

Look

Under the buttons sits one slider, Look, from Natural to Enhanced 100 % in five steps, shown in Standard and Expert mode alike. Natural shows the stack as developed. Each Enhanced step adds local contrast and clarity for a crisper picture: behind the scenes it sets Texture and Clarity in the Basic section (to 40 and 25 at 100 %) and turns that section on, leaving every other control where it was. Move Texture or Clarity yourself and the slider reads Custom until you pick a step again. The step a new session starts at is Settings › General › Default look, and the \{enhance\} piece of a file-name pattern writes it into the name (natural, enhanced-40, custom).

The sections and their eyes

Each section below has an eye in its title. With the eye off, the section keeps its values and contributes nothing; click it again and they are back. That makes an A/B of any one section a single click.

Basic

Every control runs from −100 to +100 except Exposure, which is in stops.

Curve

Four region controls, Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows, each −100 to +100, plus a point curve: click to add a point, drag to move it, right-click to remove it, Clear points to start again. The curve can be drawn on luma or on the red, green and blue channels separately.

Colour mixer

Eight hue bands, red through orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple and magenta. Pick a band by its swatch and set its Hue shift, Saturation and Luminance, each −100 to +100. This is the tool for one colour that is wrong while the rest are right: a leaf too yellow, a sky too cyan.

Colour grading

Three wheels tint the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights: a hue, how much of it (saturation, where zero is no tint whatever the hue), and a luminance trim. Blending sets how softly the three ranges overlap; Balance shifts the split between shadows and highlights.

Effects

Vignette darkens or lightens the corners; Midpoint is where it starts, measured from the centre; Feather is how softly it falls off.

Masks

A mask is a local adjustment: its own set of Basic sliders that apply only inside a shape, on top of the global sliders above. Add one of five kinds. Subject is the part of the picture the stack brought into focus, found the way Studio Soft’s matte finds it; Background is everything else. Radial is an ellipse, full inside and fading at its edge; Linear is a ramp, full at one end and nothing at the other; Brush is whatever you paint. Each mask has an eye, Invert, Feather (how softly its edge fades) and Amount (how much of its sliders reach the pixels), then the Basic sliders; texture and clarity stay global, because a mask has no detail pass of its own.

Show mask draws the selected mask in magenta over the picture and puts its handles there: drag a radial mask’s centre or its two radius handles, a linear mask’s two ends or its middle. With a Brush mask selected, dragging on the picture paints; hold Shift to erase; Brush size is a share of the picture’s long edge, so it means the same at any zoom. Masks ride on the look: they are saved with the session, written into the processing record, and apply to every export, the pan video and the share set. They cost nothing in the preview you do not see: a pixel outside every mask runs the global look only.

Why the sliders add rather than replace: a mask is a correction to the picture you already have. “A stop darker here” reads the same whatever the global exposure is, and switching the mask off returns exactly the global picture.

The print chain

The print chain is the part of the finish that changes pixels, and it is kept apart from the look for that reason. The hint under it says which path you are on: the scientific default, denoise and matte only, where every output pixel traces to the source images, or a cosmetic finish for display prints.

Render

Camera is the camera’s own rendering of the scene, read from the RAW and measured against the JPEG the camera embeds in every file; when the file names a picture mode, the choice shows it, and overriding it with another mode is a derivation from the one that was measured. When the stack came from TIFF or JPEG files, there is no RAW to read: the choice reads Camera (as developed) and adds no rendering at all, because the other program already made these finished pictures, while the Develop controls above still apply on top. Linear (scientific) renders the scene as measured: pixel values stay proportional to the light that hit the sensor, which is right for comparing fusion engines or for evidence, and flatter on screen because no display can show scene ratios directly. Science bundles are always linear.

Denoise and the cosmetic finish

Denoise reduces noise without inventing detail. The Cosmetic finish group is different in kind: deconvolution, super-resolution and sharpening manufacture acutance and can put detail into the image that no source image contains. Fine for display prints, not for evidence, and the choice is recorded in the session’s record.

• Deblur runs a deconvolution. With Diffraction-aware PSF (auto) the kernel is sized from the shot itself: f-number, magnification from the lens’s focus distance, the sensor’s pixel pitch, a 550 nm wavelength and half a pixel of lens blur, so the slider only sets how many iterations run. Without usable lens data the slider sets the kernel width instead, and the section says so.
• Sharpen is a plain sharpening pass.
• Super-res 2× doubles the output size. The preview fits the graphics card’s texture limit; the export is full size.
• Set magnification replaces the lens metadata with a magnification you type (2.0 is 2:1), for manual or adapted lenses and extension tubes. It feeds the kernel size and the focus-step check.

Studio Soft post

Extra passes offered with the Studio Soft engine: Subject on black with a Choke (right shrinks the subject and kills halo, left keeps more hair) and a Feather; Defringe, which pulls purple and green colour fringing at edges back toward the local colour, as chroma only or with a luma heal, with a radius and a threshold; Local contrast (baked) for a crisper, more defined look; and a gentle S-curve on brightness. Zero turns each off.

Apply

Apply renders the chain at full resolution; until then the picture shows a preview. The step card tracks the render.

Photographer stamp

A credit plate, not a banner. The camera data comes from the reference file.

• Burn onto TIFF / JPEG puts the stamp on those exports and not on the Instagram slides.
• Opacity is the strength of the type itself, Size and Margin its footprint.
• The text: Name, Byline, Site, and ©, which fills itself from the name and the year. Include ticks choose which of name, byline, camera, lens, exposure, date, copyright and site appear.
• Position picks a section of the export; on a slide it picks a section of that slide, or you drag the stamp to an exact spot, and Auto puts each slide’s stamp on the quietest section of its crop so it misses the subject. Apply to all copies the object onto every slide.
• Style is Plate (the type on a card), Type only (stacked lines straight on the photograph) or One line. The Ink option reads the pixels under the stamp and uses the opposite colour so the type reads anywhere.

The licence line under the stamp says which codes exports will carry: your stamp only when licensed; during the trial, how many days remain; in free mode, that exports carry the SpikerSoft QR and that a licence makes it optional.

QR codes

Three codes can ride on the share slides.

Each code has a Style, Plain (a crisp code made inside the program, no network) or AI art (an artistic code from the qrart service, styled by your title and description, generated at publish for the link the publish mints); a Ground, a Plate behind the code for the most reliable scan or Transparent straight on the photograph, which wants calm, evenly lit pixels; and Modules, Auto (dark code on a light photo, light on a dark one), Dark, or Light, an inverted code that phone cameras read but older scanners may not. A code’s Size is a fraction of the slide’s width; drag a corner handle or type it; Apply to all copies place and size onto every slide.

Share set

A share set is a strip of slides cut from the photograph for a carousel: swiping pans along the strip, so a tall macro reads as a journey across the subject rather than a thumbnail.

• Slides sets how many, from one, which is a single cover crop, upward.
• Overview as slide 00 letterboxes the whole strip into a first slide, so the carousel opens on the whole picture.
• For picks the preset. Instagram · portrait cuts 4:5 slides, Instagram · square 1:1, each 1080 pixels wide; Facebook · one image writes the whole strip as one image, because platforms that show a multi-image post as a grid would break the pan. Edit presets… adds your own: a name, a slide size, slides or one image, and a cap on the long edge.
• Layout: Portrait stacks the slides top to bottom with 01 at the top, Landscape makes a wide filmstrip letterboxed in the frame.

Place the crop

Drag the strip on the image to move it; drag the gold handle to rotate, and Shift snaps to 15°. Size is Actual, Instagram’s native 1080 pixels per slide on the source with no downscale, or Fit, the largest strip that fits the photograph at this angle; the slider sets anything between. Angle does the fine turn, and the toolbar’s −90°, 0° and +90° the quarter turns.

Identify the subject

The Identify · Subject pill in the toolbar, with the microscope in its middle, is the way in. Signed in, it sends a downsized copy of the finished image, at most 2048 pixels on the long side, to spikersoft.com and returns ranked species suggestions. RAW frames never leave the computer, and the first use asks for consent; the Account dialog behind the chip at the top right holds the same switch, Allow cloud subject analysis, so you can grant or withdraw it at any time.

Pressing it puts a Subject box on the photograph and opens the Identify bar under the toolbar, so nothing covers the picture you are framing. Drag the box over the organism and pull the corners and edges in so it holds the whole subject and little background (hover Frame the subject for the steps). Identify sends only what is inside, and so do Enter and the pill itself; Let the model find it sends the whole image and lets the detector pick the subject; Cancel, past the hairline at the bar’s right edge, or Esc backs out.

While the analysis runs, the bar shows where it stands (queued, analysing) with Cancel. The suggestions come back on the same bar as chips, best first, each with its confidence; hover one for its common name, rank and taxonomy, and click it to write that species into the Darwin Core record that travels with the export. None of these flags the photo for identification help, Needs identification help does the same on its own, Show your framing outlines what was sent, and Reframe & identify again starts over. Close puts the bar away (and stops an analysis still under way); the pill brings the last result back.

Why a bar and not a card: the card floated over the very picture it asked you to frame.

Export and publish

The summary says what the share set will produce: One image, a Cover, or {n} slides with their aspect and size, and whether that is Native pixels (1:1 from the source), a downscale, or Upscaled, which is a warning that the strip is smaller than the slide.

Every export dialog ends with a File name box holding the name Stacker proposes, built from the pattern in Settings ▸ General ▸ File names (stack unless you set one); change it there for that one file. Share exports the set as JPEG slides, or one image, with the stamp and codes you placed. Publish uploads the source RAW files and the finished stack with its full processing record into your private gallery on spikersoft.com; the dialog takes a title, notes, and whether to add the share-set slides to the gallery. The share link comes back here and onto the Share page code.

DNG: finish the stack in Lightroom, Capture One or DxO

Export › DNG… writes a linear DNG those programs develop like a camera file: the stack’s own scene-referred pixels, 16 bits per channel, with the headroom above white kept and a baseline exposure that puts white back where it belongs, so highlight recovery works there the way it does on a RAW. Nothing from Finish is burned in: no look, no stamp, no codes. The Finish Basic sliders travel along as Lightroom’s own Basic settings, live and adjustable, and the processing record goes beside the file. White balance arrives as shot, which is the stack’s locked white balance from Camera develop.

Why a DNG and not the Rec.2020 TIFF for this: a TIFF arrives in Lightroom as a finished picture, with its tone fixed; a DNG arrives as scene data, so exposure, highlights and the camera profile there still have the full range to work with.

The Exports panel

On Finish the Images panel shows exports instead: one card per share preset, the selected one in gold, each with its own export button and a line saying what it will write; then Pan video…, Science bundle… and Publish to spikersoft.com. Clicking a card selects that preset for the strip. The panel follows the same dock choice as the Images panel: beside the picture as a list, under it as cards, or in its own window.

The toolbar

• Fit brings a panned-away photograph back; Isolate shows one slide’s crop on its own with the photograph dimmed around it, and Esc shows the whole strip again.
• Actual and Fit strip size the strip; −90°, 0° and +90° turn it.
• Undo and Redo walk the edit history (layers, look, print chain and brush strokes).
• Apply (Expert) renders the print chain at full resolution.
• The Identify · Subject pill, centred in the toolbar’s free space, starts the framing; the badge on its microscope shows the state: a lock until you sign in, a ring while it runs, a tick or a mark when it answers.
• Export holds every format, the pan video and the science bundle; Share exports the set; Publish sends it all to spikersoft.com.

Status messages on this step

“Drag the strip to place it · drag the gold handle to rotate (Shift snaps 15°)” in the status bar; “Enter identifies · Esc cancels” while framing; “Finish chain complete” once Apply has run. The step card reads “Import a photo first” or “Stack first” until there is something to finish.