Damselfly

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

Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau

Keifer
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 1:54 pm

Damselfly

Post by Keifer »

Hello to you all.
After weeks of trawling through this site and looking at all the amazing images i decided to join in. I have uploaded an image of a Damselfly that was sent to me from Florida by a kind contact. I have tried my best with the equipment i have to get a descent final image from stacking 24 images together in Helicon Focus (i have the cheapest version of the program). I used a 7D iso100, exp 125 and a Carl Zeiss Jena Planar 1:4.5 F= 3.5cm attached to Canon Auto Bellows via a step down fitting. Lighting was with a 580 Mkii with a homemade diffuser made out of an old butter tub. As you can see its not the best with areas devoid of detail and sharpness. Is there an ideal length that the bellows should be set when using the Carl Zeiss or is the lens not really that good and i should look for something else better (it cost £26 on Ebay).

Best RegardsImage

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Keifer, welcome aboard! :D

The first thing that strikes me about your image is that it seems awfully low contrast -- all the tones are crammed together into the center half of the histogram, roughly between 60 and 190. That makes life tougher on any stacking software. In fact there's an artifact we call "stacking mush" that's commonly triggered by low contrast. Helicon tends to be pretty vulnerable to that problem, so that may be a big part of the difficulty here.

My guess is that the low contrast is due to flare -- large amounts of stray light bouncing around inside your bellows and ending up getting laid uniformly over the whole image. To check for this, remove the camera from the bellows and look into the bellows by eye. For a particularly good test, point a flashlight into the front of the lens and shine it around at various angles. Ideally, you should see no light except what comes directly through the lens, but probably you'll also see some bright reflections around the side of the bellows, mount, or adapter rings. All those reflections need to get blackened or baffled. Sometimes you can make big improvements by using an external shade specialized for macro, as shown HERE, bottom right of the first panel.

My guess is that once you get the contrast under control, your stacked images will get a lot better. Then will come the question of what settings to use in the software. Subjects like this one with thin long hairs can be particularly tough to handle because of an artifact called "halo", in which either background areas around the hairs go fuzzy or the hairs themselves get lost. In Helicon Focus, probably Method A is the better approach for this subject. It's more vulnerable to halo around the outside of your subject, but less vulnerable to losing the hairs themselves.

As far as I know, there is no difference in output quality between the various versions of Helicon Focus. However, I believe the cheap license does not provide retouching. That may eventually be a significant limitation with this sort of subject.

If you're open to considering alternatives, you might try Zerene Stacker. Its PMax method often does a good job on subjects of this type, where you have to deal with hairs or bristles and large areas that are still OOF. ZS also includes retouching even in the cheapest license. The standard disclaimer is that I wrote Zerene Stacker, so I'm biased. That said, it's optimized for what I like to do, and as it happens, I like to do hairs and bristles.

You asked specifically about bellows length and lens. I'm about 99% sure that most of your problems lie elsewhere. I'd expect the Zeiss to be pretty good, and at this magnification most any lens should give a much better image than what you're getting here.

--Rik

ChrisLilley
Posts: 674
Joined: Sat May 01, 2010 6:12 am
Location: Nice, France (I'm British)

Re: Damselfly

Post by ChrisLilley »

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

Firstly, what Rik said about flare. Secondly, looking at the lens you used:
Keifer wrote: a Carl Zeiss Jena Planar 1:4.5 F= 3.5cm
Carl Zeiss Jena means it was made in East Germany (so before reunification) and a focal length in cm rather than mm (plus the rather slow aperture for a 35mm lens) implies an age in the 1930s - 1960s or so; the lens might be uncoated or have only single coating, which would also contribute to low contrast.

The first thing to check is flare from adapters or inside the bellows, as Rik said, but secondly have a look at the lens for coatings - oh, and also for fungus, which shows as fine spidery white marks on the glass and will, if extensive, also give low contrast.

Hmm, does it look like these?
Image
Image credit: Dr. Zun Koana, University of Tokyo

If so, very early, looks uncoated.

NikonUser
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Location: southern New Brunswick, Canada

Post by NikonUser »

I think Rik is correct; lots of flare.
Lens itself seems quite sharp.
A Levels adjustment in Photoshop, some curves, some smart sharpening shows the hairs clearly.
With more care in getting the initial image I think you have a reasonable system.
Image
NU.
student of entomology
Quote – Holmes on ‘Entomology’
” I suppose you are an entomologist ? “
” Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name.
No man can be truly called an entomologist,
sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr
The Poet at the Breakfast Table.

Nikon camera, lenses and objectives
Olympus microscope and objectives

Keifer
Posts: 52
Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 1:54 pm

Post by Keifer »

Hi Rik

Thank you so much for the reply.....I have matt black hands now...lol. I sprayed the areas that reflected light with matt paint. The reflections were coming from the step down ring so fingers crossed i will get better contrast in my images now. There was also light reflecting from the inside of the actual bellows.......is this something that can be fixed or is it something i will have to live with?
I've had the free trial of ZS that i downloaded a while now but it did not work on my computer (iMac)...it mentioned something about not having enough memory and to go to preferences etc..i can't really remember.....i will try to run it again and let you know what happens.

Hi Chris

I have the exact lens that is in the bottom left of your picture. I have a Schneider-Kreuznach Componar 1:4.5/50 that i want to try....would it be better to reverse it or not? Sorry for all the questions but until now information has been hard to get as some people don't like sharing their techniques etc.

Hi NikonUser

Your post of my image is a great improvement on mine......i have so much to learn....thank you for the tips.


To you all...............I can't thank you all enough........i have learn't so much.

Best Regards

Keith

Chris S.
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Location: Ohio, USA

Post by Chris S. »

Keifer, welcome to the community!

(Edit--I wrote this while you were composing your response, above, and didn't see it prior to posting.)

I doubt you’ll get many comments in this thread, as most of us will look and see that you’ve already been given super-solid advice. I hope you’ll repost with some results after you try the things that Rik, Chris L., and Tony (NU) suggested. My bet is that you’ll see dramatically-improved results.

A couple of additional points do cross my mind, though. I was wondering if you should reverse your lens. My initial thought was “no,” as (if I understand correctly) this lens was designed for macro and therefore should be fine in normal front-forward orientation. But I’ve never used a lens like yours, and if it were my lens, I’d probably test it reversed versus non-reversed, to be sure that reversing it does not bring benefit—at these magnifications, reversing many lenses does often result in a marked improvement. (This experiment should definitely be after you’ve dealt with potential flare, tried Zerene Stacker, etc.—those measures will likely bring bigger benefits.)

Also, you asked about ideal bellows draw. Since I don’t know the size of your damselfly, I have no idea what magnification you were shooting for the image you posted. And while I don’t know your Jena 3.5mm lens at all, a wild guess based on focal length might be that it would be best at about 6x (more informed others, please feel to correct me on this). Assuming this, with your Canon 7d (which has a 22.3mm x 14.9mm sensor), a 3.7mm object would, at 6x, cover the long dimension of your frame. So as a starting point, I’d suggest cutting a 3.7mm piece of paper, setting your bellows draw such that this paper exactly spans the wide dimension of your image, and see how that looks. After experimentation, you may well find that more or less bellows draw improves your quality—but this might be a reasonable starting point for your tests.

Cheers,

--Chris
Last edited by Chris S. on Thu Mar 24, 2011 1:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

I'm sorry to hear about your hands! On the bright side, probably everything else is well-covered also. Regarding reflections from the bellows material itself, you can attack those by 1) using an external lens shade to keep light away from the bellows sides in the first place or 2) adding a mask or two inside the bellows to block light that is not on a direct path from the lens to the sensor. Black paper is a friendly material to do this with. Spraying the inside of the bellows would be risky because of flaking and stiffening of the fabric.
Keifer wrote:I've had the free trial of ZS that i downloaded a while now but it did not work on my computer (iMac)...it mentioned something about not having enough memory and to go to preferences etc..i can't really remember.....i will try to run it again and let you know what happens.
On first execution, ZS runs with a small memory allocation that is not large enough to handle modern cameras at full resolution. It takes you to a Preferences > Memory Usage screen that allows to allocate more memory. The amount you can allocate depends of course on how much physical memory your iMac has in it. If your iMac has only 1 or 2 GB, then you may still not be able to process at full camera resolution. However, ZS is happy to downsize images on the fly if necessary to fit in memory. Usually it will automatically detect that this is required and ask permission to do it. If you need to control downsizing manually, the control is at Options > Preferences > Preprocessing > Image Pre-sizing. If your iMac has 4 GB or more, then it will handle any current DSLR by allocating 2 GB to ZS.

If your free trial period has expired, contact support@zerenesystems.com for an extension.

--Rik

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