Focus Stacking with Helicon Focus

Zeiss Guide

Focus stacking twelve (12) 21MP 16-bit TIF images using Lanczos 8 with default rendering settings.

Helicon Focus version 4.2.7 is fairly well written to take advantage of multiple CPU cores, but has a scalability bug that causes it to be slower with 12 cores than with 6 cores— thread contention on shared locks, or similar problems. I checked the settings, repeated the tests, and even ran the 6-core and 12-core side by side to just watch the 6-core finish first!

The 2011 MacBook Pro takes only 18% longer than the 3.33GHz 6-core Mac Pro, an outstanding performance for a laptop.

The 2010 MacBook Pro take 128% longer than the 2011 model. The reason for this disparity is unclear.

Test machines used my preferred SSDs, see the test configuration. Hard drive users will see slightly degraded results over those shown here.

Time in seconds, lower is better