Putting the finishing touches on your images is nearly as important to the final result as taking the images in the first place. I will briefly discuss Adobe Photoshop work, and the techniques of stitching and stacking.
Photoshop or other image editing software is used extensively for brightness and contrast, cropping and resizing, color correction, sharpening, noise reduction and re-touching, among other possible operations.
Stitching is taking multiple photos in a panorama and using software such as Microsoft Research ICE to align and appropriately blend them into a seamless single photo.
Stacking is taking multiple photos of the same field and combining them, either to increase the signal-to-noise ratio if no changes were made to the photographic setup or to preferrentially use the parts of each image in a focus stack that are in focus. These two functions can be done in Image Stacker for basic image averaging or Zerene Stacker for focus stacking.
Stereo Image output is an added benefit of focus stacking, because Zerene Stacker assumes the layers are uniformly spaced and in proper order, it can construct a 3-D map, allowing calculation of stereo pairs or viewing the stack from differnt angles, allowing animations to be made of your subject "rocking" in 3-D.