Andy I tried Helicon Focus sometime ago and found it to the best available at the time, but wasn't prepared to pay the asking price, so remained with CombineZM. That was until I bought CS4.
CS4 is excellent at aligning and blending, but is very resource hungry, often bringing my old PC with Dual Core CPU with 4GB of ram to a standstill.
I now have a new self build pc with AMD Phenom 9950 Quad Core Processor 2.6GHz. 4Gb ram on Vista Ultimate 64 bit.
Have just done a speed check stacking 8 images. Aligning images 15 secs, Blending images 35 secs.
Helicon Focus is a stand alone product and is marginally better than CS4, but please bear in mind it's probably two years since I used Helicon.
IMO though for convenience CS4 is better due to the fact that you can send images direct from either Bridge or Lightroom direct into layers in Photoshop ready for aligning and blending.
Harry
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