Super colorful fluorescent plant seed [+ Picture added]

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Thu Jul 21, 2011 11:20 pm

Playing around with fluorescent dyes I found an interesting combination:

Notice the nuclei in the seedling. Also sorry I was unable to upload bigger size of the pic on which it looks much better with lots of details, forum limits.

Actually in my previous post I showed a collection of best pictures that I've got, now I'll be posting mostly from the trash folder with less successful work.

stack of 90 pictures,
10x lens
Zeiss Axiostar
Mercury UV lamp
Canon Powershot G10

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 1:04 am

Very nice!

You mentioned in earlier post that you had done the stacking by hand. Here you're listing "stack of 90 pictures". Still by hand, or did you find some software that would work for you?

--Rik

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 1:31 am

Thanks for pointing that out, in this case I used photoshop to stack it automatically (2 stacks combined into a single image) with some manual retouching and editing background after stitching. In this case it was easy as the object was not a moving one, I had time for longer exposures resulting in getting better quality pictures which PS was able to understand. It seldom happens though=(

I am not that insane to do 90 pics totally manually, besides 40-50 would be more than enough in this case

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 1:43 am

forum limits.

Psst! If you split a "tall" image like this into two each 1024 square, you can post one straight above the other.
I think we are all used to scrolling the screen

You can of course post elsewhere, eg flickr, Imageshack etc and give the link, as an addition to hosting the smaller image here.

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 4:00 am

Ok that's c close-up of the top, I think it's more spectacular than the bottom. Revealing out-of focus areas on the right. Hope in the future I will manually add them to the pic. Another example of how stacking software is missing narrow parts when dealing with fluorescent images.

Harald · Post by **Harald** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 5:36 am

Hi,
What can I say ?? Amazing!

arturoag75 · Post by **arturoag75** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 7:12 am

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 9:12 am

Starshade wrote:Thanks for pointing that out, in this case I used photoshop to stack it automatically (2 stacks combined into a single image) with some manual retouching and editing background after stitching. In this case it was easy as the object was not a moving one, I had time for longer exposures resulting in getting better quality pictures which PS was able to understand. It seldom happens though=(
...
Another example of how stacking software is missing narrow parts when dealing with fluorescent images.

Thank you for the additional information.

Be aware that Photoshop's stacking methods are the weakest of any commonly used tool. It's very prone to leaving fuzzy regions even in stacks that other software handles perfectly.

You would have better odds using one of the dedicated stacking programs such as Zerene Stacker, CombineZP, or Helicon Focus. The image shown here has quite a bit of fine detail that should make it pretty well behaved. The images shown in your other thread have less fine detail, which makes life tougher for any stacking software.

Overall I think your best bet would be Zerene Stacker's PMax method. It is very tolerant of subjects that have no fine detail and/or have details overlapping at different depths. ZS also provides a synthetic stereo function that lets you generate stereo pairs from a single stack. See http://zerenesystems.com/cms/stacker/do ... eticstereo for some more information about that, and http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=13982 for some recent examples in the forum here.

Motion of the subject will be a problem with any software. None of the packages understand how to warp an image so as to keep moving parts lined up from frame to frame.

--Rik

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 10:18 am

Thank you for comments,

Rik, on this particular picture indeed I did not try zerene and I know it has better and sharper details.

However at the beginning I had 2 desktops and a laptop with 5 screens in total and I decided to try all possible options with Zerene, Helicon and Photoshop running between computers to save time and came to the conclusion that in an average fluorescent image project it's easier to use PS manually as I have the best control over what I am doing and to my surprise it was taking less time than correcting and retouching loads of images produced with different algorithms of stacking software... mainly because it's hard to get good details in fluorescent pics.

Why I didn't like Zerene in fluorescent stacking is that I either get noisy piece of... image or it gets too soft and losing details so I decided to make the first attempt with this seed with PS.

But now I do want to try using Zerene to make stereo images and getting possibly a better final stack

In any case the reason why I got suitable final pictures was because I had only few (5-30) images to stack

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri Jul 22, 2011 10:33 am

Starshade wrote:However at the beginning I had 2 desktops and a laptop with 5 screens in total and I decided to try all possible options with Zerene, Helicon and Photoshop running between computers to save time and came to the conclusion that in an average fluorescent image project it's easier to use PS manually as I have the best control over what I am doing and to my surprise it was taking less time than correcting and retouching loads of images produced with different algorithms of stacking software... mainly because it's hard to get good details in fluorescent pics.

That sounds pretty comprehensive to me -- experiment beats conjecture any day!

Why I didn't like Zerene in fluorescent stacking is that I either get noisy piece of... image or it gets too soft and losing details so I decided to make the first attempt with this seed with PS.

Yes, one of the drawbacks to PMax is that it increases noise a lot. If you're having to work at high ISO due to low light levels, then you'll get better results from a method that strongly prefers to select neighboring pixels from the same image. Photoshop is a good choice in that case.

--Rik

Marek Mis · Post by **Marek Mis** » Sat Jul 23, 2011 3:49 am

Hello,
The second image is wonderful. The colours are beautiful and the details are very good. I don't remember if there is anybody on this forum who takes fluorescent images of such quality. So you don't have the competitors in this area.

Regards

Marek

Starshade · Post by **Starshade** » Sun Jul 24, 2011 4:57 am

Well, I am still not satisfied with the quality results so to speak.

And no wonder no one does fluorescent photography, it takes insane amount of time and patience, basically in average I have 2-3 usable shots out of 500 (this object being an exception), moving objects and long exposures don't do well together. Immobilizing critters does not give good coloration options. And I'm not even mentioning photo editing which is a total frustration in the majority of cases.