Author Topic: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography  (Read 9086 times)

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Offline Hydron

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #25 on: July 01, 2020, 10:04:05 pm »
Ooh, seems the focus stacking rabbit-hole goes deeper than I imagined...

I'm wondering if there is any use of 3D printers as a readily available focusing stage - just attach the camera to the Z axis and send some G-code to wind it up a little bit per photo? Probably wouldn't work on the higher magnification end, but maybe with more modest setups? Apologies if this is widely done or doesn't work - didn't see anything about it in my brief look at the equipment section of the forum.

Appreciate the images!
 

Offline 2N3055

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #26 on: July 01, 2020, 10:23:03 pm »
Amazing!
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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #27 on: July 01, 2020, 10:42:25 pm »
Ooh, seems the focus stacking rabbit-hole goes deeper than I imagined...

I'm wondering if there is any use of 3D printers as a readily available focusing stage - just attach the camera to the Z axis and send some G-code to wind it up a little bit per photo? Probably wouldn't work on the higher magnification end, but maybe with more modest setups? Apologies if this is widely done or doesn't work - didn't see anything about it in my brief look at the equipment section of the forum.

Appreciate the images!

I think the best value for a good setup would be the WeMacro focus rail and the WeMacro Vertical Stand, this works well up to about 10X and some have good results beyond. Pretty much plug-n-play with your camera and lens. A couple simple mods extends the Vertical Stand to handle beyond 20X, this stand also works horizontally if you get the option.

For beginning DIY you'll probably end up spending more to get things in good working order than just getting the WeMacro. Once your "hooked" then you'll want to get better focus rails, camera, lenses, setups and it never ends, please don't ask how I know :o This is really where the DIY comes into play.

Think we've pretty much pegged the limit performance on focus rails with the THK KR types, with 400 step motors and Trinamic based controllers, that's when the piezo efforts began. This is seriously expensive stuff new, well the THK stuff is also, so eBay becomes a valuable resource :)

If you watch sometimes you can find a bargain, but it's always a risk like anything off eBay.

Some folks have 3D printed various adapters, holding fixtures and light fixtures, but I haven't seen anything like a focus rail.

The camera is probably the least important item in the setup, almost anything will work, and work well. Lenses and lighting become critical for high resolution images, and handling vibration issues becomes a never ended task, especially as you increase magnification. Kinda like the folks doing the high resolution LTZ1000 voltage references, at those levels everything matters!!

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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #28 on: July 01, 2020, 10:54:28 pm »
Amazing!

Thanks.

A colleague got a 55 inch OLED display mainly to show these chip images (well not these, but some later proprietary ones). He also had one printed on a very large metal base. They look incredible, now he's probably going for a larger OLED screen!!

If seeing a 1/2 gigpixel chip image printed the size of a wall sounds interesting, especially if it's one of your chips, then you are probably going to get hooked ;D

Best,
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Offline RoGeorge

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #29 on: July 01, 2020, 11:27:46 pm »
Think we've pretty much pegged the limit performance on focus rails with the THK KR types, with 400 step motors and Trinamic based controllers, that's when the piezo efforts began. This is seriously expensive stuff new, well the THK stuff is also, so eBay becomes a valuable resource :)

The speaker as a focus stage idea you mentioned before seems a very good alternative.  Much easier to control than a piezo actuator, also, since is a mass produced item, a speaker is very cheap.

Another idea that just came when you wrote together the words voice coil actuator and speaker (mass produced), was the actuator from a CD/DVD/BluRay unit.  It is mass produced (so it's very cheap), and is capable of very high speed moves on more than one axis.  Has all the mechanics in place, very low inertia and high speed photodiodes to implement a very fast PID for stabilisation.

Gave it a search and found a nice paper (https://doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.8b00340) about reverse engineering the optical head of a disc unit (3 different models from gaming consoles).  In the supplementary material there is a slide show presentation and some control schematics, too:  https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.8b00340

The up down range is quite limited, just a couple of millimeters, probably enough for a chip die or a very small insect.

Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #30 on: July 02, 2020, 12:33:10 am »
Think we've pretty much pegged the limit performance on focus rails with the THK KR types, with 400 step motors and Trinamic based controllers, that's when the piezo efforts began. This is seriously expensive stuff new, well the THK stuff is also, so eBay becomes a valuable resource :)

The speaker as a focus stage idea you mentioned before seems a very good alternative.  Much easier to control than a piezo actuator, also, since is a mass produced item, a speaker is very cheap.

Another idea that just came when you wrote together the words voice coil actuator and speaker (mass produced), was the actuator from a CD/DVD/BluRay unit.  It is mass produced (so it's very cheap), and is capable of very high speed moves on more than one axis.  Has all the mechanics in place, very low inertia and high speed photodiodes to implement a very fast PID for stabilisation.

Gave it a search and found a nice paper (https://doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.8b00340) about reverse engineering the optical head of a disc unit (3 different models from gaming consoles).  In the supplementary material there is a slide show presentation and some control schematics, too:  https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.8b00340

The up down range is quite limited, just a couple of millimeters, probably enough for a chip die or a very small insect.

Interesting, thanks for showing. I wonder how much load these actuators can handle?

The P601 and P603 PI Piezo Stages can handle moderately heavy loads in Closed Loop, this was the weak link of the speaker VCM. There was no practical way for feedback, so it operated Open Loop and suffered from position errors.

The THK KR rail types are very well designed and use a temp compensating base metal, probably the best available in screw type linear rails. With the Piezo stage operating in closed loop we created a setup at high magnification (800X I recall) and watched the image as a hair dryer on hot setting blew hot air across the piezo stage. It hardly moved, the control voltage was all over the place to keep the loop closed but the stage was rock steady. When this was done to the THK KR20 the image quickly drifted off screen, direct consequence of open loop operation, even with the superb THK KR20!!

The setup we use for high magnifications utilize the piezo stage and the THK KR20 rail. The KR20 is used for coarse camera/lens positioning and the Piezo stage for fine moving the subject. Many times I don't bother powering the THK rail up, just use it as a manual positioner by turning the motor shaft. Since we know the motor steps (400) and the KR pitch (1mm/turn) we can make movements by hand just counting motor cogs steps at 2.5um/step. If we need something between steps, the the KR20 must be powered to get fractional steps. The Trinamic controllers have 256 micro-step increments, so theoretically you could get 1mm/400/256, or 9.765nm increments. Of course this is ridiculous, a reasonable estimate would be 10 to 20 times that.

Best,
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~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 

Offline c64

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #31 on: July 02, 2020, 05:46:16 am »
These pictures look awesome. So sharp, look more like 3d models not photos.

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Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #32 on: July 02, 2020, 07:34:44 am »
Amazing!
These pictures look awesome. So sharp, look more like 3d models not photos.
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his collection can be downloaded at nikonimagespace (100MB+) from his thread Some Older Chip Images this will not consist of the techy stuffs discussed here and on the photomacrography forum he linked alone. photo/color doctoring is one discipline in photography also required, used in movies everytime without muggles knowing it. i used to combine photos for HDR effect and then later add punch to the color. you dont get such color in real life... few random example attached... btw i downloaded his collection for my keeping and learning later, the folder name where i've put it tells something about its ranking..
Code: [Select]
:\Knowledge\Digital Camera\Masterpiece\mawyatt (eevblog)

not have a use for FOV bracketing yet, let alone the lens used by OP to get microscopic pictures of the silicons. but one trick to increase FOV is reduce lens aperture as much as you can (pinhole camera), since amount of ambient lighting will be much reduced, you'll need more powerful artificial lightings to help with colors painting where they need to be (photographer's rule to paint with lights). i can see some imperfection in the focus stitching, either its manually edited, or the stitch SW used is not so perfect yet. maybe manual editing and "space re-warping" in photoshop can give better result esp in exhibition or competition grade purpose. ymmv and fwiw..
Nature: Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness (Stephen L. Talbott): Its now indisputable that... organisms “expertise” contextualizes its genome, and its nonsense to say that these powers are under the control of the genome being contextualized - Barbara McClintock
 

Offline Hydron

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #33 on: July 02, 2020, 08:47:44 am »
Some folks have 3D printed various adapters, holding fixtures and light fixtures, but I haven't seen anything like a focus rail.
I didn't mean printing parts to use as a focus rail, but to use the printer itself as one! On my printer a full step on the Z axis is 40 microns, and it does 1/16th microstepping so you'll get a bit more resolution from that, albeit not as linear. The X and Y axes are significantly more coarse and are likely to have issues when throwing significant loads around (e.g. my early Canon non-USM 100mm macro lens plus a camera is fairly heavy), but if you attached a sample to the Z axis and moved it up by full step increments then in theory you can move it relative to a camera sitting on the bed pointing up at it. Control is a simple as sending G code commands with the Z move distance (there may be some jiggery pokery forcing it to move without a homing cycle first, but you could get around that by homing first then setting it up for photography).

This is obviously on the less extreme side compared to piezo stages etc, but I might test it in the 1-2x max macro range I can manage with the gear I have at hand.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #34 on: July 02, 2020, 08:51:55 am »
The P601 and P603 PI Piezo Stages can handle moderately heavy loads in Closed Loop, this was the weak link of the speaker VCM. There was no practical way for feedback, so it operated Open Loop and suffered from position errors.

The THK KR rail types are very well designed and use a temp compensating base metal, probably the best available in screw type linear rails. With the Piezo stage operating in closed loop we created a setup at high magnification (800X I recall) and watched the image as a hair dryer on hot setting blew hot air across the piezo stage. It hardly moved, the control voltage was all over the place to keep the loop closed but the stage was rock steady. When this was done to the THK KR20 the image quickly drifted off screen, direct consequence of open loop operation, even with the superb THK KR20!!

The setup we use for high magnifications utilize the piezo stage and the THK KR20 rail. The KR20 is used for coarse camera/lens positioning and the Piezo stage for fine moving the subject. Many times I don't bother powering the THK rail up, just use it as a manual positioner by turning the motor shaft. Since we know the motor steps (400) and the KR pitch (1mm/turn) we can make movements by hand just counting motor cogs steps at 2.5um/step. If we need something between steps, the the KR20 must be powered to get fractional steps. The Trinamic controllers have 256 micro-step increments, so theoretically you could get 1mm/400/256, or 9.765nm increments. Of course this is ridiculous, a reasonable estimate would be 10 to 20 times that.

Indeed, load weight for a CD optical head is not much, probably a gram or so at most.

Another type of closed loop actuator, even easier to use and totally free for DIY experiments will be the actuator from an older hard disk.  HDD heads already heave the control loop, are trivial to position with nothing but software and an old PC.

I've played a few times with opened HDD running.  They can work in open air for a very long time, for many days if not weeks, in a normal living room.  The drawback is that the absolute position of the actuator is read from one of the spinning disks, so the disk must spin for the original control loop to keep the actuator in place, therefore it will come with some vibrations from the spinning plates.  Maybe synchronizing the camera trigger with the angular position of the spinning disks, or maybe keeping the objective open for infinite exposure time and just flashing some LED lights in sync with the disk RPM might help catching the vibrations always in the same position.  I don't know.

However, once locked on a track, the HDD heads are very stable, it was not easy to unlock their position by hand.  I didn't measured the force, but I'll guess the actuator could drive an extra load of tens to hundreds of grams.  That should be enough for a small stage with a chip die or an insect.

I imagine the HDD to stage adapter like a big loop of fishing wire that is anchored to the arm of the HDD actuator.  The fishing wire loop is bigger than the HDD, and leaving the HDD body through small holes in the sides of the HDD frame, so to not keep the HDD plates spinning it open air.  Small ball bearings in the corners of the closed loop of the fishing wire might help.  Seems too complicated already.

Maybe just a small aluminium stage anchored with 2 screws on the actuator's arm would be enough.  Far from ideal, but good for insects and free to try, with only a weekend long, or so, of tinkering.  Or, it might not work at all because the PID coefficients might not cope with a much heavier load...  ;D



Speaking of insects and macro shots and focus stacking, a trick that I've discovered by serendipity:

To arrange the photo posture of a live insect, and to make it stay still in the given position for a few minutes, put the insect in a refrigerator, 40° F (4° C) for half an hour, or so.   :)

This won't hurt the insect.  To them, those cold temperatures might easily happen in the wild during a cold night.  It will take to an insect a couple of minutes before its temperature will raise enough to start moving, even when put in the direct sunlight for a better photo.  That should be enough time for a quick focus stacking shooting session.



Back to that gorgeous photo you posted before, "Iridium- DMap-Obj-1a-Edit.jpg", a stupid question, but please keep in mind that I know nothing about laying a circuit in a die, so here it is:

Are those spheres the soldering balls?  Asking because they seem incredibly close to various die structures.  Some of them look like they have no dedicated pad area underneath.  Isn't there a danger for the melted soldering ball to cover or get too close to the die structures?  Then, there are some circular structures in the most left corner, I assume are some microwave coils.  Wouldn't those coils be too close to the PCB traces, or to the PCB copper planes that the PCB designer might put underneath the coils area, and thus ruin the coil's Q factor by the Eddy currents induced into the PCB's copper?
« Last Edit: July 02, 2020, 09:13:35 am by RoGeorge »
 

Online Thomas

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #35 on: July 02, 2020, 10:45:54 am »
Amazing images, mawyatt.
Clearly, this topic doesn't stop at an SLR with a macro lens and some software.
The rabbit hole is deeper than I thought. Way deeper :)
 

Offline fcb

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #36 on: July 02, 2020, 11:31:07 am »
Gorgeous images!! - any chance you can post these in high res so I can get one made into a poster for my lab wall. :)
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Offline Rerouter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #37 on: July 02, 2020, 12:26:09 pm »
I feel I have missed it, but are there any free focus stacking programs anyone can recommend to give it a try?
 

Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #38 on: July 02, 2020, 12:27:10 pm »
Amazing!
These pictures look awesome. So sharp, look more like 3d models not photos.
Subscribe.

his collection can be downloaded at nikonimagespace (100MB+) from his thread Some Older Chip Images this will not consist of the techy stuffs discussed here and on the photomacrography forum he linked alone. photo/color doctoring is one discipline in photography also required, used in movies everytime without muggles knowing it. i used to combine photos for HDR effect and then later add punch to the color. you dont get such color in real life... few random example attached... btw i downloaded his collection for my keeping and learning later, the folder name where i've put it tells something about its ranking..
Code: [Select]
:\Knowledge\Digital Camera\Masterpiece\mawyatt (eevblog)

not have a use for FOV bracketing yet, let alone the lens used by OP to get microscopic pictures of the silicons. but one trick to increase FOV is reduce lens aperture as much as you can (pinhole camera), since amount of ambient lighting will be much reduced, you'll need more powerful artificial lightings to help with colors painting where they need to be (photographer's rule to paint with lights). i can see some imperfection in the focus stitching, either its manually edited, or the stitch SW used is not so perfect yet. maybe manual editing and "space re-warping" in photoshop can give better result esp in exhibition or competition grade purpose. ymmv and fwiw..

This works (reducing lens aperture) to increase the in-focus depth, but at the same time degrades the image quality due to diffraction blurring. Diffraction is the limiting factor in achieving good depth of focus and the effective aperture is usually kept below 20.

Regarding aperture, the Effective Aperture (EA) that affects the image quality, not the lens aperture your camera reports (unless it's a Nikon which reports Effective Aperture), follows Effective Aperture = Lens Aperture (1 + Magnification). So at 1X magnification the EA is 2 times the Lens Aperture. Most of the high quality microscope lenses, which have a fixed aperture, stay under 20 for this reason.

Best,
Curiosity killed the cat, also depleted my wallet!
~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 
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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #39 on: July 02, 2020, 12:46:37 pm »
Some folks have 3D printed various adapters, holding fixtures and light fixtures, but I haven't seen anything like a focus rail.
I didn't mean printing parts to use as a focus rail, but to use the printer itself as one! On my printer a full step on the Z axis is 40 microns, and it does 1/16th microstepping so you'll get a bit more resolution from that, albeit not as linear. The X and Y axes are significantly more coarse and are likely to have issues when throwing significant loads around (e.g. my early Canon non-USM 100mm macro lens plus a camera is fairly heavy), but if you attached a sample to the Z axis and moved it up by full step increments then in theory you can move it relative to a camera sitting on the bed pointing up at it. Control is a simple as sending G code commands with the Z move distance (there may be some jiggery pokery forcing it to move without a homing cycle first, but you could get around that by homing first then setting it up for photography).

This is obviously on the less extreme side compared to piezo stages etc, but I might test it in the 1-2x max macro range I can manage with the gear I have at hand.

Ok I see what you are referencing now.

Pointing the exposed camera lens upwards is probably not a good idea, since things can fall onto the lens surface. If you could mount the camera/lens onto the Z axis stage facing downward like a normal setup that should work. Having a minimum 40um step in the Z axis will limit the magnification to less than 4X because of depth of focus. Most use setups which have under 5um minimum step size, many under 1um.

The piezo stages are an extreme case, where you are working at very high magnifications. The piezo stages mentioned have a total travel of less than 0.25mm, and step sizes of less than 0.01um!!

Best,
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~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 

Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #40 on: July 02, 2020, 01:03:54 pm »
The P601 and P603 PI Piezo Stages can handle moderately heavy loads in Closed Loop, this was the weak link of the speaker VCM. There was no practical way for feedback, so it operated Open Loop and suffered from position errors.

The THK KR rail types are very well designed and use a temp compensating base metal, probably the best available in screw type linear rails. With the Piezo stage operating in closed loop we created a setup at high magnification (800X I recall) and watched the image as a hair dryer on hot setting blew hot air across the piezo stage. It hardly moved, the control voltage was all over the place to keep the loop closed but the stage was rock steady. When this was done to the THK KR20 the image quickly drifted off screen, direct consequence of open loop operation, even with the superb THK KR20!!

The setup we use for high magnifications utilize the piezo stage and the THK KR20 rail. The KR20 is used for coarse camera/lens positioning and the Piezo stage for fine moving the subject. Many times I don't bother powering the THK rail up, just use it as a manual positioner by turning the motor shaft. Since we know the motor steps (400) and the KR pitch (1mm/turn) we can make movements by hand just counting motor cogs steps at 2.5um/step. If we need something between steps, the the KR20 must be powered to get fractional steps. The Trinamic controllers have 256 micro-step increments, so theoretically you could get 1mm/400/256, or 9.765nm increments. Of course this is ridiculous, a reasonable estimate would be 10 to 20 times that.

Indeed, load weight for a CD optical head is not much, probably a gram or so at most.

Another type of closed loop actuator, even easier to use and totally free for DIY experiments will be the actuator from an older hard disk.  HDD heads already heave the control loop, are trivial to position with nothing but software and an old PC.

I've played a few times with opened HDD running.  They can work in open air for a very long time, for many days if not weeks, in a normal living room.  The drawback is that the absolute position of the actuator is read from one of the spinning disks, so the disk must spin for the original control loop to keep the actuator in place, therefore it will come with some vibrations from the spinning plates.  Maybe synchronizing the camera trigger with the angular position of the spinning disks, or maybe keeping the objective open for infinite exposure time and just flashing some LED lights in sync with the disk RPM might help catching the vibrations always in the same position.  I don't know.

However, once locked on a track, the HDD heads are very stable, it was not easy to unlock their position by hand.  I didn't measured the force, but I'll guess the actuator could drive an extra load of tens to hundreds of grams.  That should be enough for a small stage with a chip die or an insect.

I imagine the HDD to stage adapter like a big loop of fishing wire that is anchored to the arm of the HDD actuator.  The fishing wire loop is bigger than the HDD, and leaving the HDD body through small holes in the sides of the HDD frame, so to not keep the HDD plates spinning it open air.  Small ball bearings in the corners of the closed loop of the fishing wire might help.  Seems too complicated already.

Maybe just a small aluminium stage anchored with 2 screws on the actuator's arm would be enough.  Far from ideal, but good for insects and free to try, with only a weekend long, or so, of tinkering.  Or, it might not work at all because the PID coefficients might not cope with a much heavier load...  ;D



Speaking of insects and macro shots and focus stacking, a trick that I've discovered by serendipity:

To arrange the photo posture of a live insect, and to make it stay still in the given position for a few minutes, put the insect in a refrigerator, 40° F (4° C) for half an hour, or so.   :)

This won't hurt the insect.  To them, those cold temperatures might easily happen in the wild during a cold night.  It will take to an insect a couple of minutes before its temperature will raise enough to start moving, even when put in the direct sunlight for a better photo.  That should be enough time for a quick focus stacking shooting session.



Back to that gorgeous photo you posted before, "Iridium- DMap-Obj-1a-Edit.jpg", a stupid question, but please keep in mind that I know nothing about laying a circuit in a die, so here it is:

Are those spheres the soldering balls?  Asking because they seem incredibly close to various die structures.  Some of them look like they have no dedicated pad area underneath.  Isn't there a danger for the melted soldering ball to cover or get too close to the die structures?  Then, there are some circular structures in the most left corner, I assume are some microwave coils.  Wouldn't those coils be too close to the PCB traces, or to the PCB copper planes that the PCB designer might put underneath the coils area, and thus ruin the coil's Q factor by the Eddy currents induced into the PCB's copper?



Yes those are tiny (100um diameter) solder balls for flip-chip mounting. Many years of material engineering went into the metal alloy, size, shape and wetting surface design of these solder balls so they make reliable connections without shorting to other structure.

Those solder balls are difficult to work with (photograph) since they are like tiny spherical mirrors and reflect everything around including the light sources. So highly diffused uniform lighting is required to keep the specular artifacts in check.

Great question, the coils are small inductors utilized for impedance matching networks. All the effects due to Eddy currents, silicon die subsurface and PCB placement are taken into account. The EM fields are mostly confined to much less than the physical distance between the die surface when flip mounted and the PCB surface due to the high dielectric constant of silicon (~11), so the PCB has little effect on the inductor.

Best,
Curiosity killed the cat, also depleted my wallet!
~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 
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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #41 on: July 02, 2020, 01:25:35 pm »
Gorgeous images!! - any chance you can post these in high res so I can get one made into a poster for my lab wall. :)

Thanks. Sure I can provide some higher resolution images, but they are limited in size for posting here I believe. If you look at DP Review some are available at higher resolution. Do a search for Chip Images and more will show up, the author is mawyatt2002, I've posted a few there.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/60270789

Another resource is at Nikon Image Space mentioned in one of the above threads, where you can download the images in higher resolution.

I also can send some directly but my email is limited to just 10MB.

Best

« Last Edit: July 02, 2020, 01:33:00 pm by mawyatt »
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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #42 on: July 02, 2020, 01:26:53 pm »
I feel I have missed it, but are there any free focus stacking programs anyone can recommend to give it a try?

I use Zerene, but it's not free. You can download a free trial though.

Best,
Curiosity killed the cat, also depleted my wallet!
~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 

Offline Mechatrommer

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #43 on: July 02, 2020, 03:32:20 pm »
I feel I have missed it, but are there any free focus stacking programs anyone can recommend to give it a try?
there are few in the list... i used Enfuse as one of the tools to do HDR stitching, it seems now to support focus stacking as well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking

ps: for keen programmers, you can start with edge detection algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection. where more edges information in the picture (higher spectral content or less compressible a particular portion of the image), thats where the focus should be, thats where to give more weight (or to put less mask) on the image, i guess this is how classic software based "contrast detection" auto focus in digital cameras work. blur the mask to avoid nasty result and then overlap them all. it should be not that difficult for a simple stitcher.

Gorgeous images!! - any chance you can post these in high res so I can get one made into a poster for my lab wall. :)
few replies up is the link in nikonimages.....
« Last Edit: July 02, 2020, 03:47:10 pm by Mechatrommer »
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Offline Dave

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #44 on: July 02, 2020, 03:45:50 pm »
The effective aperture (EA) generally follows as Lens Aperture, or LA, as LM(1+M), where lens aperture is the normal "reading" on most cameras (Nikon shows the EA, not LA). When you get an EA that's beyond about F20 or so, diffraction begins to eat your lunch if your images are viewed at larger sizes. Normal lenses this doesn't matter, since shooting a bird at 100 feet or a portrait at 10 feet, M is very small, so M+1 ~ 1 and EA ~ LA. However when shooting macro this becomes a problem, example shooting at 1X the EA is twice the LA, so one would begin to see diffraction effects around LA of just f11 (in very high quality work this is below f8!!). So "stopping down" the aperture to increase the depth of focus has a limited range.
[...]
Thanks for the explanation, knew there had to be some sort of catch behind it.
<fellbuendel> it's arduino, you're not supposed to know anything about what you're doing
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Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #45 on: July 02, 2020, 05:39:28 pm »
The effective aperture (EA) generally follows as Lens Aperture, or LA, as LM(1+M), where lens aperture is the normal "reading" on most cameras (Nikon shows the EA, not LA). When you get an EA that's beyond about F20 or so, diffraction begins to eat your lunch if your images are viewed at larger sizes. Normal lenses this doesn't matter, since shooting a bird at 100 feet or a portrait at 10 feet, M is very small, so M+1 ~ 1 and EA ~ LA. However when shooting macro this becomes a problem, example shooting at 1X the EA is twice the LA, so one would begin to see diffraction effects around LA of just f11 (in very high quality work this is below f8!!). So "stopping down" the aperture to increase the depth of focus has a limited range.
[...]
Thanks for the explanation, knew there had to be some sort of catch behind it.

Unfortunately there's no free lunch  :-\

Although, lately some research work has filtered down and folks are using what's called "blind deconvolution" algorithms to help remove some of the effects of diffraction. We haven't used these algorithms (yet) but others have shown good image improvements.

Best,
Curiosity killed the cat, also depleted my wallet!
~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 

Offline mawyattTopic starter

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Re: DIY Focus Stacking for Macro Photography
« Reply #46 on: July 02, 2020, 05:51:06 pm »
I feel I have missed it, but are there any free focus stacking programs anyone can recommend to give it a try?
there are few in the list... i used Enfuse as one of the tools to do HDR stitching, it seems now to support focus stacking as well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking

ps: for keen programmers, you can start with edge detection algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_detection. where more edges information in the picture (higher spectral content or less compressible a particular portion of the image), thats where the focus should be, thats where to give more weight (or to put less mask) on the image, i guess this is how classic software based "contrast detection" auto focus in digital cameras work. blur the mask to avoid nasty result and then overlap them all. it should be not that difficult for a simple stitcher.

Gorgeous images!! - any chance you can post these in high res so I can get one made into a poster for my lab wall. :)
few replies up is the link in nikonimages.....

PS has this capability built-in. It works OK, but has problems with involved macro stitching. Used it for a few simple stitching efforts, but it choked on some more complex stitches, so we ended up getting PTGui which works very well. PTGui has a somewhat long learning curve, but handled massive stitches rendering over 1/2 gigapixel (from 16~19 stacking session, stacked images rendered from ~300 images per stack at 36Mpixel per image, a total of over 200 gigapixels collected).

Best,
Curiosity killed the cat, also depleted my wallet!
~Wyatt Labs by Mike~
 


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