Be patient as the picture loads. It is an animated GIF showing the claws of the leg of a honey bee (the tarsus).
I have used the free image editing software GIMP to make this picture. The steps are as follows:
- Take a series of pictures of different focus. Make sure that they are numbered consecutively.
- In GIMP, click File – Open as Layers.
- Resize the image, otherwise the file will be too big. Click Image – Scale Image to do this.
- Click Image – Mode – Indexed and change the picture to indexed, and select dithering from the dropdown list.
- Click File – Export and export the image as a GIF. A dialog will appear where you can set parameters for the animation. Do not forget to give the file the file extension .gif.
- To view the file, you have to open it in a web browser. Try simply clicking on the file, often a browser window will open this way.
What’s the benefit of making a gif like this compared to using focus stacking with the samematerial to create one image with an extended depth of field? I can only thing of one: this is a more “accurate” or “true” representation of the source material, a focus stacked image is perhaps more prone to inaccuracies such as artifacts from the stacking etc. But the gif image format is limited to 256 colors and as such a lot of the information in the image are lost when doing this as well. Anyway, I think this is really cool, and I’d love to see more gifs in the future.
I like this post how the hidden things when comes looks so good. It really looks good.