Yes, really interesting comparison, and fantastic results even if you had only posted one of them. I'll probably be alone in this opinion but I find that I like the simple first one the best.

Glad to hear they are ok. I apologize for raising a red flag.
Lou

Thanks Adalbert. What is a control layer? Is that like a Layer mask?

The key difference is that B&W conversion allows you to adjust the contribution of individual hues to brightness in (what becomes) the luminance channel.

I think that is right, it's the main reason why here are special B+W conversion operators in addition to a simple Convert to Grayscale command

Can you give more explanation about your technique? I think this would be helpful for my scientific work....Thanks in advance.

Mark, for the vaccines that require deep freezing during transport, I think there would be some chance that these conditions were violated at some point. Certainly here in Ecuador I would be very eager to see if I really got a good-quality dose of the vaccine.

Excellent conversions! They remind me of artists' ink drawings, or of prints from old entomology manuals.

Doing deep stacks, insects and the like, without telecentric lenses, just seems doomed to parallax hell in my view. When I need to do this, I usually work with telecentric lenses and objectives. Much of my work is in liquid at 1.5-8x, and in that range a lens combo using a reversed MFT lens in fron...

Guess maybe I should have bought all 5? Well, maybe not the one with the fungus spot... I've done more stupid things than I can keep track of. Last week I paid for a two-hour taxi ride to a site I needed to surveyu with a drone. Forgot the cable connecting the controller to the tablet that runs the...

I actually do use a "light" version of stitching for my scientific work. It is convenient because it doesn't need a separate set-up. I use medium format tube lenses with a shift adapter to a Nikon camera mount. I just do two or sometimes three tiles to catch some protruding tail-like features that w...

I think you won't regret your decision. Especially since you are also working hard to learn all the other things besides the camera.

That's a great point. It is nice to have empirical data on it! I hope most of us are opening our images in Photoshop.

I've owned 3 cameras with pixel-shift, none of them had the 4X "Sony" approach, so can't comment on that.

It's worth mentioning that the Pentax K-1 also has this kind of four-image pixel shift. It makes a big difference over single shots.

I don't believe there is such thing as "medium format look" though. Not to mention how difficult (and expensive) it would be to work in a wide magnification range with a MF camera. I agree that some aspects of the alleged "medium format look" don't exist. But other aspects (DR and smoothness of col...

It would be interesting to compare a pixel-shifted image with a stitch of four normal images. We'd lose the dynamic range improvement (gained from averaging multiple shots at each pixel) and but would probably improve the resolution, though probably with some moire. Using a standard controller and a...