The viewing angle has to be like it is, otherwise I would skew it so the important details did not overlap with the structures in the background.
One solution could be to go higher mag, but I don't have a 20x Mitty, although I really should make them order one for me.
The obvious, but less satisfactory solution is to have a go at it in Photoshop, and simply paint in some definition, but that takes time and I have to do it for more than one species (props to anyone who can recognise the species/genus!). It would be good to find a way to solve the problem "pre-post", I'm sure more problems like these will pop up.
Or do you consider the image to be perfectly readable as it is? Sometimes I doubt how well the shapes come across, I can't really tell how someone without experience of these things view the image - I already know how they look in 3D since work with them under a stereo microscope to clean and mount them.
Specs:
- - Canon EOS 6D, shooting at 1/20 sec, iso100, fullsize .jpg
- 10x Mitutoyo M Plan Apo 10x/0.28
- ITL200 reversed as tube lens, at the "correct" distance from objective and sensor, giving ~10x mag
- White printer paper in a cylinder around the Mitty as a diffuser, I should probably try without a whole cylinder, as it can sometimes diffuse the light too much, lowering contrast
- lit with 2 IKEA Jansjö LED lamps
and here's how the shape should be "read", with the red part laying infront of the blue part
to give a sense of how cropped the image is compared to a full sensor 3:2 shot (5472x3648 pixels)
the two following are unedited 1024x1024 pixel "100% crops" (that for some reason in my Chrome browser is shown at 133% size?) of the output TIF from Zerene, showing the most troublesome area (line). There's lack of contrast, hairs that are rendered as transparent, lots of artifacts around the hairs and so on. And these pictures are as good as I could make it using editing of Dmap + Pmax, using sub stacks etc. With Dmap alone the area is a mess with blurry patches due to the hairs, and in just Pmax the details of the tip blends in with the details of the underlying structure. I especially find hairs that are at an oblique angle, towards or away from the viewer, to be almost impossible to come out well after the stacking. I have an iris (not in use when I took the pictures) behind the Mitty, perhaps stopping it down a tad could help?
Any help or suggestions are most welcome!