
In the spirit of disclosing significant changes in postprocessing, I confess that I applied a curves adjustment to increase contrast.
Here is the adjustment:

Pressing the Auto button for curves adjustment removed a lot of the subject's natural background color:

Here is the adjustment producing that image:

And finally, here is the original unadjusted image:

Optical setup was 10X Mitutoyo objective with Thorlabs ITL200 tube lens, to a Canon T1i sensor. The objective was significantly stopped down and the stack was shot at 20 microns step size, only 8 frames, run through Zerene Stacker using DMap. Illumination was halogen, using a single bundle of optical fiber with Kleenex tissue wrapped around its head, the light source positioned about midway along the objective, just far enough off axis to keep the objective from shadowing the subject.
Now the obvious question: what is this beautiful object??
--Rik