Ive been a bit busy this weekend photographing tray 1 of 60 (:|) from the unis beetle collection.

On the plus side I think Im getting better at bespoke microphotography (or photomicrography if youre that way inclined)

A selection of the beetles Ive processed this weekend:

Carabus nitens


Carabus arvensis


Carabus hortensis


Cicindela campestris


Nebria salina


Carabus violaceous


Ive discovered what the mask tool is for in photoshop, so I can take multiple photos of different parts of a specimen at different focal depths, use the photomerge tool to align them, and then use masks to show only the in-focus parts

phnar phnar.

Glue and/or pins, posthumous...

sounds like it would be easier to just wind the aperture closed and use a longer exposure to get a lot more depth of field focusing the whole object...

I think theres special software which can blend this kind of thing automatically for you (kind of like the panorama software you get, but for depth of field). Ive never tried it but might be worth a google.

I think theres special software which can blend this kind of thing automatically for you (kind of like the panorama software you get, but for depth of field). Ive never tried it but might be worth a google.

Aye, I think the useful ones though may be device specific? Certainly there are a couple of scopes at uni that have specific software for doing it. I think Hugin also can do it using "Enblend" or something. To be honest though I quite like the manualness of it, depending on the amount of detail I want it doesnt take too long at all to do. Certainly I think I probably spend less time doing them than some photographers would spend processing a normal photograph

Photoshop does a good job at merging the images, but it just gets confused over which ones to put on top. Once you have a method though its quite quick. Add the photos in the photomerge window, disable the blend option and merge them. This aligns them all. Add a mask to each layer and make all but the bottom one invisible. Now progressively make each layer above visible, in the process noting which bits are out of focus and drawing on the mask to remove them. Sounds like a lot of work but as the mask has a soft fade around the edge you can do a single layer in about 10-20 secs depending on detail...

they scare me  :puke:

Yeah, but they tend to get a bit soft at full res, or have CA, or something!

EDIT:
They have been shrunk down as well, they pretty much take up the whole of a photo, I dont know if that is 1:1 or whatever, those magnification scales confuse me.