Sharp: Multi-Frame Merge

Shoot the same thing more than once, and Sharp puts the shots together. Five tools, one engine. Nothing here edits a single photograph — everything here takes many frames of the same scene and gives back one picture. FOCUS — sharp from front to back A lens holds one plane in focus, and close up that plane is thinner than the subject. Move the focus between frames and Sharp takes every part of the result from the frame that has it sharpest. Macro, product work, a landscape with heather at your feet and a valley behind it. CLEAN — less noise, and long-exposure water Noise is different in every frame and the subject is not, so averaging frames takes the noise down by the square root of how many you shot: four halve it, sixteen quarter it. It is also a long exposure without a filter — water and cloud move between frames and average into smoothness, while everything that held still stays sharp. VANISH — the people walk out of the picture Stand still and take a dozen frames a few seconds apart while the square empties and fills. At each pixel Sharp keeps the frames that agree with each other and throws out the ones that do not, then averages what is left. Whoever was walking through was never in most of the frames, so they are gone — and because it averages rather than picking a middle frame, the noise goes with them. TRAILS — every place the light went A hundred short exposures of a night sky, a torch drawing, headlights on a bend. Sharp keeps the brightest frame at each pixel, so every mark the light made is in the picture and the sky stays as dark as one frame had it. Or keep the darkest frame instead, and take the passing lights out. PICK — the sharpest frame of the burst Twenty handheld frames, one of them caught between heartbeats. Sharp measures the detail in each and hands back the one that won, exactly as it came off the camera. BUILT FOR LARGE SETS • Camera RAW, HEIC, JPEG, TIFF and PNG, read straight from Files or Photos • Frames are read a strip at a time, so a fifty-frame set of 45-megapixel RAW never needs to fit in memory — ten 45MP frames average in about a second and a half • Alignment that covers focus breathing and the drift between handheld shots, and that checks its own work before using it • The list survives quitting, the screen stays awake, and the title bar shows how much memory the last run actually took LOOK AT IT PROPERLY Pinch and pan to one image pixel per screen pixel, then switch to any single source frame at exactly the same zoom and position. That is the only honest way to see whether the merge found more than your best single shot. Beside the picture is the map of how it was decided: depth for a focus stack, which frame left each mark for trails, and for vanish, a picture of exactly what was thrown away. PAINT IT BACK Every one of these tools is a guess made a pixel at a time, and every one of them gets some pixels wrong. Choose the frame that has that part right and paint it back over the result: one finger paints and two move the picture, an Apple Pencil presses harder for more, undo and redo, and erasing takes the result back. What gets exported is the repair re-applied to the 16-bit file at full depth, not the preview you painted on. FREE, AND THEN ONE PAYMENT All five tools run on up to 12 frames free, at full quality: the same alignment, the same merges, the same speed, the same RAW support, and a full-resolution JPEG with no watermark. Nothing about how good the picture is has been held back. $9.99 removes the frame limit and adds the retouch brush, 16-bit TIFF and map export, and a second way of merging a focus bracket. One payment, shared with your family. No subscription, no account, no sign-up, and not a timed trial. NOTHING LEAVES THE DEVICE No analytics, no tracking, no server, and no network of its own. Your photographs are read where they are, and the only thing that goes anywhere is what you share yourself.