MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

gekko wrote:

rnabholz wrote:Sorry guys, didn't mean to vex you, but I think that is another contributing factor to my troubles.

These darn diatoms do in fact push my equipment's capabilities. I am not used to the idea that my camera just might not be able to deliver what I am expecting from it and that is a reasonable outcome.

Toss in the slight spreading of point sources that comes with darkfield, and a fellow starts to doubt himself.

That is not to say I have everything mastered, and that it is all the equipment's fault, not by a long shot. And that is why I am interested in everybody's approach.

Thanks for the efforts so far and the great discussion.

Hope others will still chime in.

Rod

As far as I know, if your camera-microscope optical "connection" is proper, and the sensor image is parfocal with the eyepiece image, the camera should be able to give you almost as good a result as you see through the eyepieces. You have an excellent sensor with much more than enough resolution. So if the image is significantly worse than the view through the eyepiece, maybe you should look into that (starting with brightfield in order to remove one factor; also DF is harder to judge, and harder to expose properly because I think the contrast can be very large.)
Having said all that, other than this image and one of a circular diatom, I thought your images are superb and for darfield images, I think they are more than superb. So I wouldn't let one or two pesky diatoms aggravate me. Maybe try brightfield on those. Sorry. I'm rambling...

gekko wrote:BillT, thank you for your attempt, but as you know, downsizing an image throws away information, but enlarging it does not add back the information that was lost in downsizing it. So, in effect, we get the equivalent of empty magnification. At least that is what I think.

billbillt wrote:

gekko wrote:BillT, thank you for your attempt, but as you know, downsizing an image throws away information, but enlarging it does not add back the information that was lost in downsizing it. So, in effect, we get the equivalent of empty magnification. At least that is what I think.

Hi Gekko,
Yes, you are absolutely correct.. I only posted it for possibly eye appeal..

BillT

mrsonchus wrote:I don't know if it helps but I've read that every time an edit-and-save is made to a jpeg image quality lessens - I don't really know what this means, I'm just starting to try to improve my images as this excellent thread has inspired me to have a mess with some of them...

rnabholz wrote:

mrsonchus wrote:I don't know if it helps but I've read that every time an edit-and-save is made to a jpeg image quality lessens - I don't really know what this means, I'm just starting to try to improve my images as this excellent thread has inspired me to have a mess with some of them...

Hi John.

JPEG is what is known as a "lossy" compression format. It basically trades some quality to reduce file size. So when you save that Raw file to jpeg, it turns out much smaller, because the software takes a look at the file and decides that it can do without some of the pixels and tosses them overboard.

If you open a JPEG and edit it and save it again as a JPEG, you subject a file that has already passed through the JPEG machine to a second round of the same thing, some data goes overboard again, and the file size shrinks again. Keep doing that and you will have a mess when you are done.

Rod