Scales of a Spotted Sea Trout

[Marcepstein]

Spotted Sea Trout scales from the upper dorsal area. This is a stack of 5 shots. I cropped out the most of the unfocused areas.

[rjlittlefield]

Marc, that looks like an interesting picture but it is very small, only 600 x 189 pixels.

Nonetheless, I see that the file size is 241 KB. This combination of small pixel count and large file size suggests that you are using a less than optimal method of creating images for posting.

The forum limits are 1024 pixels on the longest side, and file size no bigger than 300 KB (kilobytes). In Photoshop, a good approach is to use File > Export > "Save for Web (Legacy)". That method provides a good estimate of file size based on compression level, and it also automatically omits some metadata that could otherwise increase the file length without adding value.

This image should easily fit within the 300 KB file length limit, at maximum size of 1024 pixels wide, by using the "Save for Web" approach with a suitable compression level.

--Rik

[Marcepstein]

Thanks Rick, I will repost with you instructions. I wasnt sure what I was doing wrong.

Tks

[Marcepstein]

Spotted Sea Trout scales using 4 stacks. I should explain that this was a recently captured fish and if I had to do it over, I would fillet it first to flatten the skin and scales. The shots were taken in natural light. As seen, the unfocused areas are the curvature in the upper dorsal area where the spots were most prevalent. I have cropped out most of the unfocused areas and enhanced the contrast and colors to "beautify" the image.

[rjlittlefield]

Lovely!

--Rik

[MarkSturtevant]

That is an interesting subject. I don't know about fish, but these may have a mixture of pigment bearing cells (yellow and dark brown), and iridescent cells (those bright spots). Like one sees in the skin of cephalopods.

[Marcepstein]

Yes, I believe you are right. The spots you see in the photo are not very notable if you don’t look closely. The fish have large black spots along the back and nice irradiance along the upper dorsal area and near the head. I used a MP-E65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro lens to enlarge that area; the little spots look a greyish-silver. Here is a picture of the fish’s head where it is hard to see the tiny spots in the irradiance unless enlarged but shown around mouth area.