Free Photo Stacking Software Alternatives superior to Photoshop

Photoshop and Lightroom might be a great thing, but the problem is that despite maybe being considered not expensive, still not everyone can afford it. This post isn't necessarily about replacing Photoshop, although for some uses you could, albeit with these pieces of software, you mostly lack image alignment. Instead, this is specifically about stacking software (things such as image averaging, exposure blending, focus stacking, etc.) Here; a couple of very interesting pieces of free software that very few people know about. First, let’s discuss one called Starstax: I have tried using starstax to make a time stack video, and although it can only make a photo, it can still save each frame, or photo, so that you can use another piece of free sofware for making time lapses or video editing, to assemble the remaining photos into a time stack video, or what you could call by the term “stacklapse”. The great thing about this software is that you can stack photos in a way that you also can do in other programs which would include layers, using programs such as Photoshop Elements, except that this free program has some options that aren’t available in other programs. As a user of Photoshop Elements 15 and Gimp, as well as having had used Photoshop CS5 for quite some time, I can say that this free program is more automatic, or in other words, can do stuff quicker. The main difference in which other programs could be better is that they offer more control over each photo, or layer, although that’s not necessarily a requirement. I like the fact that you can choose between average, add, subtract, multiply, lighten, as well as other modes; that’s something which can’t be done quickly and efficiently w/Photoshop Elements and Gimp can’t do it as well, unless of course, you do it manually, changing the opacity of each layer one by one, and choosing the correct blending mode one by one. That’s simply too much hassle, especially if you have many images. Next, there’s a program which can do wonders; automatic exposure blending, averaging (which can be combined with dynamic range expansion!), superresolution, etc. I was pleasantly suprised once I cam across this particular program; some of the things that it can do can’t be done in Photoshop Elements, and when comparing to the full version of Photoshop, even then are there features of the program which aren’t implemented into Photoshop! It’s called Chasys Draw IES, and the powerful program can also do focus stacking, and has a feature which I still find unknown use for, and it’s called “Mega Stack”. The next time I might use this feature, I want to post the screenshot of it, so don't leave the blog permanently!