What is z-stackr?

z-stackr is a professional grade focus stacking application built entirely in Rust. Focus stacking takes a series of photos of the same subject, each shot at a slightly different focus distance, and blends them together into one image where everything is sharp from front to back. It targets photographers doing extreme macro work, focus bracketed landscapes, and scientists doing microscopy who need every part of a tiny or complex subject in focus at once. At the core of the tool is an alignment engine that lines up the individual photos before blending them, since even a tripod mounted camera shifts slightly between shots as the focus changes. It offers several alignment strategies, ranging from simple shifting to a full geometric transform, and can automatically choose the best method or fall back to a safer one if the fancier approach fails. There is also an optional neural network based alignment mode for advanced users willing to enable an experimental feature. For actually blending the sharp parts of each photo together, z-stackr supports multiple fusion algorithms with different tradeoffs between speed, smoothness, and how well they handle tricky depth edges, plus a separate AI powered blending mode built on a dedicated machine learning framework called Burn. The tool processes images tile by tile rather than loading everything into memory at once, which keeps memory usage manageable even when working with very large or very many images. Other notable features include full 16 bit image support to preserve fine tonal detail, the ability to copy camera metadata from the original photos into the finished output, and optional support for reading camera RAW files directly from many major camera brands without needing outside software. Python bindings are also mentioned as part of the project, suggesting the tool can be used from Python scripts as well as its own interface. The project shows a passing build status and is released under the MIT License, so it is free to use and modify. It is aimed at serious photographers and scientific imaging users who need precise, high quality focus stacking rather than a casual point and click tool. The full README is longer than what was shown.