A time of change

Blogger has forced the new interface on me. I hate it and had to go back to the legacy interface to publish this because I couldn't insert an image in the new version. I'm wondering if it's time to go back to Wordpress again, but more realistically, since most of my posts are image-oriented, it's likely to be Flickr. After 24 years of Photoshop, I've moved to Affinity Photo. I'm finding it quite a learning curve. But now the important stuff. I've been a Zerene Stacker user for years but for a number of reasons felt I ought to try Helicon Focus, so I grabbed the nearest spider and took a 27 photo stack, then ran them both through Zerene (PMax) and Helicon (Method C):


Spot the difference? Actually there is one, but maybe not what you think. There are lots of reviews of Zerene versus Helicon online, and I can now confirm what they all say! Zerene is *marginally* sharper - but only if you pixel-peep, Helicon is much faster (4-5 times on my setup). What does this mean in practice? A 27 image stack that takes 3 minutes 14 seconds to process with Zerene runs in 40 seconds with Helicon. But Helicon is over a hundred quid and marginally less sharp. I may be better investing in hardware. Opinions welcome!

(Update: partial solution to the Blogger problem, a browser conflict).