JohnyM wrote:I wouldnt even touch that large panorama without telecentric optics.

Thanks for your vote of confidence. It really is these little bites of encouragement that keep forums alive.

Pretty sure there isn't. Not in the UK anyway. Just the occasional articles in ordinary photography magazines. There are a few books dedicated to the subject. Amazon is your friend for finding those. https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=macro+photography+books Having bought at least three o...

Just for fun I loaded my latest stack and stitch into Photoshop to see how it would cope. So far, there are 230 tiles covering this beetle. Once finished it will be a ~600 megapixel image. The alignment took just over 90min on a 2013 MacPro with 6-cores, 16GB of ram and a 2TB scratch drive. Photo al...

The formula sitting behind the table is DOF = lambda/NA^2, so more accurately the DOF would be 0.00055/0.125^2 = 0.035 . Hi Rik, A couple of, probably irrelevant questions, about this equation. Why is lambda in mm and not nm? Is it just to give an output that is also in mm? Why is lambda green? For...

I print all the diffusers and lighting modifiers I use in ABS. The HackSpace I have access to has about 15 UP Minis , 4 Ultimakere 3's as well as several other bigger printers and a SLA resin printer for bio materials. Oh, there is also a Markforged which is able to do fine prints, threads and lay d...

oh wow, I was merely pointing out the step size might be too small . . . on my computer, it took close to 50 minutes to do a full stack. The stacks process a little faster for me, maybe 35min each. Which isn't too bad as I can set them off at night to be touched up in photoshop the next day. There ...

Thankd Rik, that's very helpful!!! The shift values that appear in your stack are quite large (Y shift averages 3.6 pixels between adjacent frames), and indeed when I turn off shift corrections the image degrades to junk. Unfortunately I live in a house with wooden floors and two sets of neighbours ...

Peter, I have made a DropBox folder and put the Zerene project and the original files in it. Everything it uploading at the moment but they should all be there by the time you read this. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1invppgqdy9aqwy/AABrz6IPNGXLmTk6brVO3VnZa?dl=0 Rik, There are some off Aligned images,...

I've been playing with my workflow in the last couple of weeks, which has involved getting Zerene for the first time. I've captured a series of stacks and then set the batch processor to run in Zerene producing PMax and DMap images for later blending. Most of the exported images have come out great ...

I too am looking at getting a new computer - I am using a university Mac Pro at the moment and it means I technically breaking IT policy.

This website is one I've found really useful.

Maybe there are things that can help you with your build.

Finally got my 10x stitch and stack rig set up and this is the progress after almost a week of imaging (in the evenings). As the imaging is taking so long I thought I would share the progress so far. There's been no editing, just stacking, trimming the edges and stitching. The stitched image is alre...

Is there a local Hackspace you can join?

These are normally good places to find a "self-service" 3D printer or two and if it's a good one some help in getting set up.

build a system around the principles of confocal microscopy I may be getting the wrong end of the stick here but I would think this is a really bad idea for macrophotography. If you mean just blocking out a lot of light so that only a small part of the subject is illuminated then the "quality" of t...

Thanks for the detailed reply Rik. I am going to have to give this a bit more thought and read up on telecentric optics again. In the mean time, because I've already bought the lens and objectives, I am going to carry on setting up my 10x system. There's a lot more to this macro stuff than there see...

Lucas, I think your basic problem is that you're trying to stitch images that don't actually fit together properly. The reason they don't fit together properly is that stacks shot with the MP-E 65 lens will inevitably have quite a bit of perspective distortion. The field of view of the lens fans ou...