ChimpStackr

Open source multi-platform program for focus stacking many images.

View the wiki for instructions.

Focus stacking is often a necessity when working with high-magnification pictures... Chimpstackr implements the laplacian pyramid fusion algorithm (see: Sources)

Gallery

Following image stacks have been taken by me. Each image has been stacked using ChimpStackr and post-processed using darktable. Each image stack contains around 150 individual images. Every image in the stack was taken at around 4x magnification on a (slightly) wobbly rig. This should be a good test for both the stacking algorithm, and the alignment algorithm.

The post processing consists of these steps:

• A minor cropping of the edges (to remove 'artifacts' created by alignment algorithm)
• Sharpening
• Contrast, saturation improvements

The alignment/stacking process for ~150 images took about three minutes on my hardware.

Build from source code

• Clone repository
• Install python requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
• Run file src/run.py to start the program

Local build

Note: you can only build for your current platform. So for example building an AppImage on Windows is not possible natively.

• AppImage: appimage-builder
• Windows/MacOS: pyinstaller --icon=packaging/icons/icon_512x512.png -F -w -n ChimpStackr src/run.py

Sources

• Focus stacking algorithm (slightly adapted) implemented from: Wang, W., & Chang, F. (2011b). A Multi-focus Image Fusion Method Based on Laplacian Pyramid. Journal of Computers, 6(12).

• DFT image alignment algorithm adapted from: https://github.com/matejak/imreg_dft