Cellular division

[Linden.g]

I found these motile organisms in farm land run off. Not sure what they are. I focused on their surface to show their flagella. Taken with 100x Olympus S-Plan achromate, 2.5x phototube lens, DIC flash.

[lauriek]

I fixed your broken img tags..

Lovely shot Linden, you've got to grips with that microscope in no time!

[Linden.g]

Thanks Laurie, I always seem to get the words trapped around the picture and cannot find a way to submit the image without going on to the window which says submit a second image. I'm finding the microscope easier than the submission process

Linden

[rjlittlefield]

Linden, take a look at Step 5, HERE. Click on that blue underscored "standard" at the bottom of the upload dialog, shown at the first red arrow.

I had the devil's own time finding that link too. I always used to do an "Insert picture and upload another one", then canceled out of the second upload. Finally I decided there just had to be some clean way to do it, figured it out, wrote it down, and edited the picture to include the red arrows. This was just a few months ago. Oh, and you really do have to click on the blue underscored word "standard" -- clicking on the black underscored "Insert picture" next to it won't do the job! I have no idea what the designer of that particular GUI was thinking about.

--Rik

[Linden.g]

Thanks Rik, that explains a lot, I was doing exactly what you were doing and missed the standard button completely.

[Charles Krebs]

Linden,

100X objective critters can be tough, very nicely done.

All the images you have posted since you got the microscope have been very good... as if you've been doing this for some time!

Have you experienced any need for CA "clean-up" with the S Plan Achromats?

[Linden.g]

Thanks Charlie. My success in a short period of time is very much due to you and the rest of the excellent members of this forum. The willingness to share knowledge and expertise is why I joined this forum. I've gone from knowing very little about how to use a microscope to being able to produce reasonable images in a couple of weeks. Starting with advice on what scopes to buy then how to convert the light source to LED and flash. Training with commercial diatom slides then moving on to making wet mounts, how to allow them to slowly reduce in thickness, picking targets close to the coverslip and tuning the DIC. I’ve essentially bypassed years of trial and error because of this shared knowledge. I still have a huge amount to learn but at some point I hope to be able to add to this knowledge for new members who join the forum.

I have modified all of my posted images using Photoshop CS4 to reduce CA from the S-plan achromats I’m using. I’ve had to do this via hue/saturation settings as the standard CA removal tool doesn’t seem to work for microscope images as it does for camera lenses. My typical workflow is:

1. Open Canon raw file in Photoshop raw converter
2. Like you I balance the colour temp to a neutral shade and then center the histogram for brightness, adjust black level, set the curves, remove any remaining colour imbalance, remove noise and then open the file into Photoshop main program.
3. I use adjustment layers for hue/saturation to remove CA, tweak levels and curves.
4. When I first started with microscope images I was shocked by the dust spots so always clone these out.
5. I sometimes make a second layer and blur this to make a mask to remove unwanted back ground junk.
6. I then resize, sharpen, change colour space and reduce to 8 bit for the web.
7. If I’m stacking I go to Zerene Stacker via TIFF’s after step 2 and then come back into to Photoshop at step 3.

I realise there have been some discussions about being transparent about post processing. I do what ever it takes to optimise the image as I see this as part of the creative process and no different to optimising the physical parts of the process.

Thanks again