Critique my image

Just bought that first macro lens? Post here to get helpful feedback and answers to any questions you might have.

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rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Smokedaddy wrote:I tried a few late last night with another larger Cabbage Looper.
Good images, wrong ID. This is not a Cabbage Looper. It's a sphinx moth, something along the lines of the Tobacco Hornworm although probably not exactly that. There are a bunch of different sphinx moths in Arizona and I have no idea what the larvae look like.
Dunno what the diamonds are inside his mouth.
Those are gaps between V-shaped serrations on the mandibles, with matching V's forming each diamond. The green is head, showing through between the dark brown mandibles.
I also tried taking an "overall" of this puppy with my Cannon 100mm Micro. I didn't have a clue what the settings should be, how many images to stack or how to get the full width in focus. I'm not even sure if the lens is capable of sharpness at the corners. Have any suggestions on how I should of approached the over all image? It was only about 10 images, f/8, with the camera flash and .005 steps.
I assume you mean one of the Canon 100 mm macro lenses. They should be capable of corner-to-corner sharpness, no problem.

Regarding step size, take a look at the tables at http://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/do ... romicrodof . Assuming that this image was shot at 1X (about 23 mm across the frame), then Table 2A shows that with an APS-C sensor, the recommended aperture is f/5.6 with a step size of 0.28 mm or less. I assume that your ".005 steps" are in inches, so equal to 0.127 mm. That's a little smaller than you would have needed, especially at f/8 for which the acceptable step size would be 0.56 mm.

--Rik

Smokedaddy
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Post by Smokedaddy »

... you mean "green diamonds" right.

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Post by Smokedaddy »

Thanks Rik,

There's a lot to know about all this, let alone the particulars of creatures being photographed. I also appreciate the information and chart link.

BTW, what are all the marks that Zerene places in the images? Some sort of image stacking alignment marks? I've been removing all of them with Photoshop.

Image

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Post by Smokedaddy »

Image

ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

BTW, what are all the marks that Zerene places in the images? Some sort of image stacking alignment marks? I've been removing all of them with Photoshop.
That one's a "hot pixel" - they happen. :(
If it were dark it would be sensor dust.
The "track" is created because the field of view is slightly different for each image in the stack, and they all look like detail to the stacker.

The last image is great, except for the fluzzy yellowish bottom edge.
What's that?
Chris R

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Post by Troels »

Sorry for my misidentification.
It is a reminder for me to always remember to notice the location.
I just noticed the differences from the common European species of Spinx, and went for one looking more like the Picture.

I know nothing about American species.

Troels
Troels Holm, biologist (retired), environmentalist, amateur photographer.
Visit my Flickr albums

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Post by Smokedaddy »

I had this critter laying on a clear welding lens. I'm not sure what the yellow is, maybe a reflection from a towel I had by the light. <duh> Those marks sure don't look like hot pixels to me, here are some more.

Image

Image

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Post by Smokedaddy »

Troels wrote:Sorry for my misidentification.

Troels
... no stress on my end, I know nothing about them regardless of where they live. <g>

-JW:

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Smokedaddy wrote:Those marks sure don't look like hot pixels to me, here are some more.
To me the appearance here is completely typical for what I call "warm pixels" -- not completely white but significantly brighter than surrounding pixels. The effect is caused by more rapid accumulation of charge from electrical leakage rather than light. It is worse at higher physical temperatures and with longer exposures. Shooting with live view turned on makes the problem progressively worse because that heats up the sensor.

Check your source images. I'll place great odds that for every one of those trails you find a single bright pixel at the same coordinates in every source image. Those single bright pixels get expanded into bright trails through the mechanism described above by ChrisR.

If you shoot raw and convert to TIFF you may see that the single bright pixel is surrounded by completely normal pixels. If you're very lucky, in that case you might even see that the single bright pixel simply goes away, because the raw converter is smart enough to know about the problem and to cover it up by throwing away the bad pixel and filling it in with a value interpolated from surrounding good pixels. As seen here, each bright pixel is flanked by dark pixels. That's typical of in-camera JPEGs, but can occur in other situations also.

Just out of curiosity, what do you think a "hot pixel" looks like?

--Rik

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Post by Smokedaddy »

You are correct. I looked at several of the images that I stacked and see the hot and white pixels in each image. I know the Astrophotography folks take dark frame and create a master dark and then subtract the master dark from their subs, followed by a Astro-stacking program. Maybe I'll try that before running the images through Zerene.

I read here that the fellow solved the problem with his 50D by doing the following. I haven't tried that yet. I see there are other avenues to pursue too.

http://blog.willshootphotos.com/2008/10 ... hot-p.html

To bad someone hasn't made a script in Photoshop to mask out the hot and white pixels on a .jpg file.

-JW:

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Schneider-Kreuznach Componon 28mm f/4

Post by Smokedaddy »

I finally got my 30.5-52mm Step-Up Ring today (thanks Charles for the help) for this enlarger lens. Still waiting for a 30.5mm filter to prevent the jamming scenario on the aperture ring. I have the enlarger lens mounted on a Nikon PN-11 and BR3 etc. (if I recall) I'm not sure what the mounting configuration should be for "optimal" optical results with this particular lens? My first attempt. I have no clue what this is, just honing my skills.

-JW:

Image

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Post by Smokedaddy »

Different lighting and I added an extension tube. What causes the blurriness around the antina in the second image?

Image

Image

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Post by rjlittlefield »

Smokedaddy wrote:What causes the blurriness around the antina in the second image?
Those look like classic DMap halos. The "swirly" appearance results from the depth map slewing through a bunch of completely OOF frames, on its way between focused foreground and focused background. The first image looks to have been rendered with PMax, which is not vulnerable to that sort of problem.

--Rik

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Post by Smokedaddy »

Thanks for taking the time to respond. To be honest, I didn't even realize I stacked both formats. <red-faced> I just found an explanation here.

http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... highlight=

Would ImageJ and DeconvolutionLab plugin be of any use?


-JW:

Smokedaddy
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Retouching

Post by Smokedaddy »

I tried another stack today with the 50D and my MP-E 65mm but I didn't save the project. <duh> I still have the images. <g> Will Zerene(s) retouching be able to fix all the halo(s) in this "stand alone" DMap image? I watched the video twice which was very well done but I wasn't able to get it to work after I generated the DMap and PMax images. Instead I spent a lot of time in Photoshop trying to fix this puppy up to "this point". I'm more than willing to keep trying to figure out the retouching technique but didn't want to waste anymore time if it can't be done "on this image". If not I'll simply start over.

Image

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