- How long will the holiday sale run? I know with Zerene I have until December 31st to decide whether capture their 20% off. But, if Helicon's made a similar indication, I'm failing to spot it on the website or Facebook.
- Does Helicon provide an indication of development direction priorities to other photography and software companies (e.g. Canon, Fuji, Microsoft, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, ...)? I ask because I've encountered a surprising number of glitches in 7.6.1 on Windows 10. So it would be useful to have some sense of what to expect in future versions.
- If Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y is pressed too many times during retouching 7.6.1 crashes. From what I can tell this looks like a problem with running off the end of the undo/redo action chain, so it's surprising the unit or UI tests aren't catching this. (I can email some of the resulting crash dumps from %LocalAppData%\HeliconFocus to support if they're of interest.)
- Ability to add multiple stacks to a project but only saving the most recent stack. Silently discarding a user's work is pretty much never a good idea. So it's a bit concerning the user interface allows a many to one stack:project configuration when apparently the project part of the system only supports 1:1. Limitations around saving projects to allow retouching after batch processing noted in a few other threads here seem corollary to this. Zerene's project generation during batch processing is more thought through than Helicon's present form and, for me, this is a substantial compete as improved retouching is one of the main things I'm looking for.
- Missing accelerator keys and shortcuts. For example, Alt+F doesn't open the file menu, Ctrl+S doesn't save a file, the + and - keys don't zoom in or out like they do in most image manipulation software (either with or without control or shift), and so on. This slows basic, repetitive tasks such as moving around images during retouching, lowering productivity.
- Pressing space toggles only the most recently selected frame in and out of stack rather than operating on all selected frames. As a result, it's faster to shred video by scripting ffmpeg externally from Helicon, review the resulting frames in IrfanView, delete them in Windows Explorer, and then import the resulting .jpgs in Helicon than it is to use Helicon's built in functionality.
- Not providing a list of which outputs aren't saved in the exit warning. But also apparently forgetting that the outputs from batch processing are automatically saved. The latter is a basic state check so I'm surprised unit tests aren't catching the defect. I also see I'm not the only user to have noticed.
- When stacking 8 bit TIFF input (generated from Hugin/PanoTools) output TIFFs are saved with malformed transparency channels and may or may not viewable in other software. So far it's been trivial to fix this by stripping the transparency channel in other software but that's not something which should be necessary.
While most operations in Zerene are slower my experience is it's more robust and therefore potentially competitive when time lost to crashes or other software limitations is considered. More clearly assessing that tradeoff is something which will require spending some time using both tools, hence the curiosity as to when the holiday sale closes.