... and a 10x magnification, detailing the eyes behind the transparent edge of the shield:


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Nice one! I like your colors. I reckon these beasts need a lot of careful retouching. Zerene can only do so much, and it is easy to overlook details in that forest of bristles. You might want to do a little more retouching under the right compound eye, where I can spot a forgotten DMap artifact. htt...

I still wonder if there is a way to eliminate the reflection of the black flocking, wrapped around the objective. Are you looking at the "black hole"? If so, then be aware that's not the flocking, it's the inside of the camera, seen through the front of the lens. The only way to eliminate that is w...

This must be its reproductive organ. http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/userpix/6070_bug_penis_ds_1.jpg I had two of these beetles in a jar. To my surprise, despite being in captivity, I found them in a copulatory position. I carefully tried to release them from the penis captivus situation, but ...

I'd love to see this a bit bigger, would that be possible? Even our forum limits allow it, about 2x if you don't mind cropping some of the black. ... and here is a 100% zoom on the dotted pattern above the head. We can also observe the scales on that cool, transparent, tortoise like, protective shi...

And here is a frontal view of the same goldbug:

I'd love to see this a bit bigger, would that be possible? Even our forum limits allow it, about 2x if you don't mind cropping some of the black. Here you go: twice the size, slightly cropped: http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/userpix/6070_Goldbug_DS_1.jpg Very nice. This is a challenging beetl...

Same fellow's wings:

It makes sense. I will remember that.
This specimen is from New Jersey.

I cannot make out if the hairs are branched or not, and I also would need to see the basal tarsal segment on the hind legs. Just throwing it out there, but there are small kleptoparasitic bees called cuckoo bees that look like this insect: http://bugguide.net/node/view/389377 I believe this is the ...

Same fellow - full frontal

This begs another question about sharpening, when shooting RAW: I believe it is better to set RAW sharpening (i.e. in Lightroom) down to zero before stacking, to minimize stacking artifacts, and only mildly sharpen the final, retouched and post-processed TIFF, before JPEG conversion. Do you have a d...

Thanks Rik! So if resources are not an issue, it is advisable to permanently enable this feature, right? I'm noticing less noise on PMax, to the extent that it looks almost as good as DMap, from this point of view. But maybe this is only because yesterday's tests were based on slightly smaller stacks.