...two little babies on the way...

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Tonikon
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...two little babies on the way...

Post by Tonikon »

Hi everyone,
today I have the pleasure of sharing with you a photograph of a Chydorus with two beautiful eggs well safe in the specially prepared "room".
As in almost all Cladocera (as far as I know ...) the eggs are parthenogenetic and often also "ephippial": they can be transported over land by wind and hatch when they reach favourable conditions, allowing many species to have very wide distributions.
This picture is a mix of Brightfield and a special 3D illumination (using a DIY solution, by passing light through a convex lens), with a tad of "conservative" post-production by Photoshop (only to invert luminosity and enhance contrast).
Toni
Attachments
Chydorus w eggs DF.jpg
Last edited by Tonikon on Sun Jan 24, 2021 10:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

rjlittlefield
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by rjlittlefield »

Excellent -- and that is a very clever trick, to invert just the luminosity channel so as to convert brightfield to darkfield while preserving colors!

--Rik

Tonikon
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by Tonikon »

Exactly, Rik ... you can convert the image in Lab Color Space and invert only the brightness channel. I found that this method allows to obtain a "DF-like" result, without altering the "scientific" value of the image.
For completeness, I'm also attaching the original photo obtained by mixing bright field and DIY oblique lighting (see topic viewtopic.php?f=14&t=42866)
Toni
Attachments
Chydorus w eggs BF.jpg
Last edited by Tonikon on Sun Jan 24, 2021 10:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

rjlittlefield
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by rjlittlefield »

Thanks for including the original. That matches pretty close to what I got by inverting the lightness channel in an Lab version of your post at top of thread.

But it does not match exactly, so now I am curious.

I notice that in your original, the eyes are very dark, almost black. With inverted luminance those go stark white, very different from the only slightly lightened eyes in your first post.

Can you explain the post-processing in more detail?

--Rik

Tonikon
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by Tonikon »

In fact Rik... at first I tried to mix together multiple duplicate layers by playing with the different blending modes. By slightly changing the brightness of two overlapping layers, you can achieve very different effects. But in the end, I thought that the dark field, after all, is just an "inversion" of brightness and I got the final result, keeping only some small "parts" of the previous experiment. Among these parts, the eyes that (being black...) with the inversion of brightness become white and gloomy like those of a ghost ...
T

MarkSturtevant
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by MarkSturtevant »

Very nice stuff! I was going to ask the same question about getting the eyes "right" after inverting the brightness channel. Again a very nice technique that I should like to try one day.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

Tonikon
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Re: ...two little babies on the way...

Post by Tonikon »

MarkSturtevant wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 1:08 pm
Very nice stuff! I was going to ask the same question about getting the eyes "right" after inverting the brightness channel. Again a very nice technique that I should like to try one day.
Hi Mark,
the eyes "right" came by accident ... with Photoshop you can mix the layers together (after duplicating them) or mix a single layer with an underlying color with often unpredictable effects. Now, I tried to process the original shot again ... I like to play with Photoshop ... so I replaced the two old images with the new versions, which I prefer ... just slightly different (but maybe now the "DF-like" is a little too saturated?). I hope you like them too.
Toni

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