MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Myrmica rubra shot using transmitted polarised light at x200 magnification. The ant was about 6mm.
A composite of about 1500 images. 33 images stitched together made from stacks of about 50 images.
Hand stacked!
Transmitted light insects/arthropods tend to be poorly rendered in Zerine Stacker (well probably in anything). So you have to get in with the retouching airbrush.


The polarised light shows the striated muscle fibres inside the ant.
The starfield is not fake, but rather small bits of dust etc. in the mounting medium, made visable with polarised light. I did darken the background (which took a lot of editing time).

Very nice

return of the Alien Ant - Star Wars 13

Very nice results and interesting! I am pleased to see the old art of "hand stacking" being used once in a while. I used the same technique on the arcella.

OK, I'll bite - what is hand stacking??

Very nice image, always cool to see POL light up musculature.

Many thanks Francisco, Hobbyst46, hkv and KurtM.

Thanks for biting KurtM

In Zerine stacker after you have stacked the image using its two algorithms you can "retouch" the image.
The stack of images appears on the left and you can "scroll" through the images. They can switch between them and the main image back and forth.
You can then airbrush any of the images in you stack to any place in your "automatically" stacked image.
In fact the starting point could be anything -> but you normally start with say the DMAP stacked image (the 2 algorithms are called DMAP and PMAX).
You can also airbrush parts of the other "automatically" stacked image so make DMAP/PMAX hybrids --> useful actually.

Some images e.g. fairly deep translucent ones shot with transmitted light (or polarised light) can look pretty ropey by with either algorithm.
What you end up doing is airbrushing the focused part of each frame (or most) on the ongoing "retouched" image.
In some cases you basically digitally paint the image except that the paint are pixels from your desired (probably the well focused) part of a image in your stack.
Hence hand-stacked to differentiate here with automatically or algorithmically stacked.

Presumbly you could do this in photoshop, but Zerine Stacker has a good interface for it and you do tend to use some of the orginal stacked image.

Very impressive indeed!

Thanks

Bonjour
Très beaux
Merci pour le partage
Cordialement seb

Beautiful image you give us, thankyou biliben74. Indeed your whimsical title for this image does suggest to me an ant floating in the offplanet cold near vacuum of space. I hope my case of astronomical eyepieces never collect dead ants in their fields of view. Charlie guevara

billben74, thanks for that. As a matter of fact, that's the Zerene technique I routinely use on diatom frustule images since their transparency notoriously means confused stacking results.

But I was unaware of Pmax and Dmap hybrid ... how do you access source files of one when retouching a stack of the other??

Many thanks IanW, merci beaucoup vasselle, and many thanks for your kind words charlie g.

- KurtM
Run stacking using both algorithms. Select which ever one you think has the edge e.g. DMap.
Click retouching. Not select you PMap output image. That now becomes the active image for the airbrush used in retouching so you can, manually, create a hybrid.

I do this quite often, and may then select a few of the images from the input stacked images to polish things.
As mentioned by several people including yourself certain translucent subjects (e.g. this ant and diatom frustules) are just to tough for either algorithm and you have to do the work yourself.
But there are also subjects, some crystals for example, where a hybrid is a good solution. I find that DMap often gets nicer colours but PMap gets the textures better.

Wow - Nice