Thanks for the comments. Here is the original image:
Vanox AHB3T microscope. Blue excitation fluorescence. 200w hg bulb. Zeiss Planapo 4x 0.14 160mm/- objective. Direct projection to canon t3i. 54 photos stacked with Zerene PMAX method. I never do this but for some reason I used 200 ISO and I think the image quality suffered from that.
In post i used smart sharpen, a simple mask with a steep curve nearly blacked out the background and left the hairs alone. A separate mask for the eye to alter the color. And one more tedious mask for the hairs. This one probably took 10 minutes to finish. l didn't complete the body, partly because they were difficult to distinguish.
The inverted photo(white background) did not have the hairs masked. Just the eye.