focus stacking-does anyone save all the images?

[Eric Brody]

I have been using Zerene stacker and have been quite happy with its features. However, I now have an awful lot of images on my hard drive which I'll likely never use or look at again. While I'm not as meticulous as some, I'm sure, I still do stacks of 20-40 images fairly often.
I'd like to know what others do with all the rest of the images used to make the stack.
Do you save them and if so, why?
Does anyone find themselves going back and re-stacking very often?
I'd love to hear from Michael Earlewine as I've read many of his articles and learned a lot.
Thanks for any responses.
Eric

[kers]

depends if you think you need them later on...

Harddisk space is not that costly;
I always think;
If i throw away one photo that i needed later-  i could buy a 6TB hard disk for that money.

[Hening Bettermann]

Yes I save all the source images. And I'm happy that Helicon allows me to save the completed stack in a form that makes it possible to revise the retouching. If I discover a 'ghost' in the stack after the fact, I can go back and re-do the retouching with the completed stack as point of departure - I don't have to re-do all the retouching, which may be a lot. This pre-supposes that I have saved the source images together with the Helicon Project file in a Path that must not be changed.

Good light!

[mdijb]

After merging the stack, I inspect the result.  If ok, I then delete the originals.  I am concerned with filling up my catalog with images I will not use again, and I am trying reduce clutter tht I will never touch again.

MDIJB

[peterwgallagher]

I send the images to Zerene Stacker as TIFFs from Lightroom (using the ZS plugin). When I'm done I save the output file back to LR but I do not accept the ZS option to save the Project unless I'm thinking of working on it again (usually, not). I don't save the TIFFs since I have the raw files in the LR catalog. At worst I can always re-compose using ZS. So, the end result is I have one more (usually pretty big) file in the LR catalog: the ZS stacked image. I usually work on that to adjust tone, sharpen etc and I'm done.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I have been using Zerene stacker and have been quite happy with its features. However, I now have an awful lot of images on my hard drive which I'll likely never use or look at again. While I'm not as meticulous as some, I'm sure, I still do stacks of 20-40 images fairly often.
I'd like to know what others do with all the rest of the images used to make the stack.
Do you save them and if so, why?

Hi Eric,

I usually create TIFFs (sometimes JPEGs) that have had all Raw conversion optimizations (like CA removal, de-vignetting or light fall-off and light cast correction), dust removal (in C1 with LCCs), basic capture sharpening, etc, applied. Once I've achieved and retouched a successful stack, I'll throw the TIFF intermediaries away, but I do keep the Raws (with parametric corrections) because that allows me to recreate the intermediaries at will and with the latest Raw conversion engine capabilities.

I do understand your question, because deep (thin-slice) stacks do occupy a lot of storage space even in Raw format. And their volume rapidly grows. On the other hand, Storage is relatively affordable, so you could consider burning the source files for one or more stacks to DVDs (or swappable hard disks for larger quantities, in a docking station), just in case.

Does anyone find themselves going back and re-stacking very often?

Not often, but it does happen, e.g. when new Raw conversion engines become available, or new Stacking insights warrant a rerun.

Cheers,
Bart