Any Luck with Helicon Focus or CS4?

<p>I love what I've been able to do with HDR and stitching and so I was hoping to do as well with the two focus programs I have tried: Helicon Focus and the equivalent in Photoshop. But both are hit or miss, mostly miss by a country mile.<br>

One issue is that I haven't paid for Helicon Focus so I only get a low-res output, but its problems do not relate to resolution. It seems like both programs do not use the sharpest part of each image file but almost mix and match or maybe average. Helicon seems to mangle the colors too. Usually I just have to do it the old way, i.e., cloning and cutting & pasting.<br>

Does anyone have any suggestions or success stories?</p>