Manual de Stacker

Reference

Keyboard shortcuts

Every combination below is the factory binding; all of them can be changed, cleared or reset under Settings › Shortcuts, and the program’s own hover texts always show the binding in force. Cmd means ⌘ on macOS and Ctrl on Windows and Linux; the program writes it that way on screen too. When you bind a combination with the third modifier, it is shown as Option on macOS and Alt elsewhere; no factory binding uses it.

Keys act only while no text box has the keyboard, and the combinations of a group act only where that group applies: the Touch up keys on the Touch up step, the Images keys on the Images step, the Finish keys on Finish. A combination used in two different groups, such as Cmd Z, is not a conflict.

File

These work on every step.

Stages

One key per step of the ribbon. They carry Shift so that they never collide with Touch up’s zoom keys, which use Cmd with the same digits.

Touch up

The A/B key is held, not pressed: the source shows in the result pane for as long as you hold it down. Alt-click on the result, which picks the image the engine used at that spot, is a mouse action and is not rebindable.

While Align compares alignment methods, the same keys work there: Zoom to fit and Zoom 100 % set the viewer’s zoom, the A/B key shows B in A’s place, and the Images keys below step through the methods, with Shift stepping B. Esc goes back to the images.

Images

Delete is the forward-delete key; on a Mac laptop keyboard that is Fn with the delete key. With several rows selected the key removes them all; with one row selected it leaves that image out in place, the same as the row’s eye. The two arrows also step through the outputs of an adjustment matrix.

Finish

The symbols in the list

Every row of the image list carries a line of small symbols. Hover one for its name and, where there is more to say, a detail after a dash: which image a gap is to, what the scan measured. The ? in the list’s header opens the same legend, What the symbols mean. The Images chapter has the same table with the labels the list prints.

Gap, alignment fallback and Moved are drawn in the warning colour, because each one asks for a decision. Soft, No gain and the duplicate are observations and are drawn muted. A row carries at most one of the scan’s flags, the most severe.

Files Stacker reads and writes

Images it reads

Every RAW file is decoded by the RAW support library that ships beside the program; the colour work after the decode, white balance, the camera matrix, the flat field, fringe removal and highlight recovery, is Stacker’s own and runs on the linear data. If the library is missing, RAW files fail to develop with the message “RAW support library not found; RAW files cannot be developed”, and TIFF, PNG and JPEG still import. Olympus and OM System files also carry the lens’s focus step and distance in their maker data; Stacker reads those, and they are what Curate’s coverage and the Still-life step suggestion are built on.

File ▸ Import Images… offers RAW, TIFF, JPEG and PNG files; File ▸ Import Folder… takes every RAW, TIFF, PNG or JPEG image in a folder; dropping files on the window does the same. A TIFF, PNG or JPEG is taken as already developed: it skips Camera develop, and its pixels are used as they are.

Sessions

Exports

Glossary

• Focus bracket: a run of photographs stepping the focus from the nearest point of the subject to the farthest, close enough that every part is sharp in at least one.
• Depth of field: the zone of acceptable sharpness around the focused distance. At macro magnifications it can be a fraction of a millimetre.
• Focus step: the lens’s own unit of focus travel, read from the camera file. Curate compares the step between frames with the depth of field.
• Gap: a step between two frames larger than the depth of field, so that nothing between them was recorded sharp. Shown as GAP in the list and counted under Curate › Coverage.
• Reference frame: the image every other image is aligned to; REF in the list. The sharpest frame near the middle of the bracket is the usual choice.
• Align: warping each image onto the reference so that only focus changes through the stack.
• Fallback: an image whose direct alignment against the reference was implausible, so a coarser, chained estimate was used; ALIGN in the list.
• Bake: writing the alignment and the crop into the images, so every engine works on identical pixels. Crop does it; Stack does it to the automatic rectangle if Crop was skipped.
• Engine: one method of judging which image is sharpest at each point and combining the winners. Stacker ships thirteen.
• Subject: a saved starting point of fusion settings and engines for a kind of picture, under Stack › Subject.
• Slab: a sub-stack of a deep stack, fused on its own and merged with its neighbours by depth.
• Depth map: which image won at each point, as a grey ramp.
• Provenance: which source image each pixel of a result came from.
• Confidence: how contested the engine’s choice was at each pixel; low confidence is the red of the Stack › Review overlay.
• Companion stack: a second engine’s result, stacked from Touch up, used as the source to paint from and to show where the two engines disagree.
• Base and source: on Touch up, the result you paint onto and the image or stack you paint from.
• Scene-referred: pixel values in proportion to the light that reached the sensor, before any display rendering. Everything before Finish works on scene-referred data.
• Camera develop: the conversion of RAW files into neutral images: white balance, the camera profile, the flat field and fringe removal. Colour science, not editing.
• Camera profile: the colour matrix the images develop through: the file’s own, or one fitted from a ColorChecker.
• Flat field: the lens’s vignetting, measured from an evenly lit plain surface and undone before white balance.
• Lateral CA: the colour fringing a lens leaves at the edges of the frame; corrected on the linear data before stacking.
• Look: the creative adjustments applied at display and export time, under Finish › Develop. They never change the stacked pixels.
• Print chain: the render choice, denoise, deblur, sharpen and super-resolution under Finish, applied by Apply.
• Focus map: the tint over the sharp parts of a picture on Capture and Touch up; its colour and peaking are shared with Settings › General.
• Share set: a strip of slides cut from the photograph for a carousel; swiping pans along the strip.
• Science bundle: an evidence-grade export with the fused TIFF, the provenance and confidence rasters and a processing record.
• Adjustment matrix: a sweep of engines and settings over a baked stack, browsed on the Matrix step.
• Budget: a limit on the memory the image cache, the bake pipeline or the GPU may use, set automatically or overridden under Settings › Performance.
• Free mode: Stacker after the 30-day evaluation without a licence: 15 images per stack and the SpikerSoft QR on every export.

Troubleshooting

The camera is not found

Over USB, the panel says what it found: “No camera on USB — plug it in and set its USB Mode to RAW/Control”, or that the body “is in Storage mode”. Set the camera’s USB mode to RAW/Control; in Storage mode it is a disk, not a camera. Over Wi-Fi, join the camera’s own network before pressing Connect. A body that has gone to sleep can be woken over Bluetooth with the name and passcode from its own Bluetooth settings, under Capture › Camera.

RAW files will not develop

An error reading “RAW support library not found; RAW files cannot be developed” means the RAW support library that ships with Stacker is missing from the program’s folder. Reinstall Stacker. TIFF, PNG and JPEG still import without it.

Most frames are flagged MOVED

The subject or the camera moved during the bracket. Read the findings under Images › Curate: when the subject settled into a new position partway through, the finding says between which frames. Keep one side of the bracket, or split it into two stacks with New stack from selection, because the two halves will not fuse cleanly together. The flags are advisory; nothing is removed until you say so.

Soft bands in the result

The bracket had a gap: the step between two frames was larger than the depth of field. Curate’s Gaps count and the GAP symbol in the list show where, and hovering Gaps says by how much each one missed. Nothing sharp was recorded there, so no engine can fill it; reshoot with a smaller step. Curate’s Suggested step gives the step for 70 % overlap at this lens and aperture.

Halos along bright edges

Open the engine’s gear on the Stack step and switch on Halo suppression, offered by Balanced, Sharp Regions and Adaptive; it subtracts the glow inside the band where a near edge hides what is behind it. Or paint over the halo on Touch up with the Darken brush from a source image where the edge is clean: Darken only replaces pixels where the source is darker, so it kills a bright halo and touches nothing else.

Only some of my images were added

“Only {kept} of {n} images were added — free mode allows 15 images per stack.” The 30-day evaluation has ended and this copy is in free mode. A one-time licence, under Settings › Account, lifts the limit; a session saved during the evaluation still opens whole.

Exports carry a QR code I did not add

The SpikerSoft QR is part of free mode. Settings › Account says whether this computer is in the evaluation, in free mode or licensed; a licence makes the code optional under Finish › QR codes.

The disk filled up

Cropping keeps the uncropped images on disk, about the size of the whole stack, so the crop can be undone. Keep crop on the Crop step frees them; hover the button to see how much that is. Settings › Performance › Keep uncropped images for Undo crop switches the safeguard off for good.

A key does nothing

Keys act only while no text box has the keyboard; click the picture or press Esc to leave the box. A combination shown in the warning colour under Settings › Shortcuts is shared with another action in the same group, and the Touch up, Images and Finish keys act only on their own step.

A step is dark

Hover it: the card says what it is waiting for. “Import at least two images first” on Align and Stack; “Align the images first — the crop is defined in reference space” on Crop; “Stack first — touch-up paints source pixels onto the fused result” on Touch up; “Stack first — the finish chain runs on the fused result” on Finish, or “Import a photo first” when there is nothing at all; and “Run File › Adjustment Matrix… on a baked stack first” on Matrix.