Cerussite from Tombstone, Arizona

I used the MPE-65 set at 5x and f/2.8. I set exposure to manual and 1/8 of a second.

Lighting is two Jansjo lamps with no diffuser. I turned room lights off and put a black cloth below the specimen. I set my color balance to 3600K.

I am using a 20 micron (0.020 mm) step size, which is 12 motor steps for my rail. I set the bottom focus to 101300 and the top to 101960, which yielded 56 exposures. I took a manual exposures to check things, then deleted it.

I had lightroom directly capture the images, which it saves as CR2 files. When it finished, I used Ctrl-A to select them all, then used the lightroom export to generate TIF files, putting them back into the same directory without resizing or renaming.

Now I go to my linux machine and start Zerene. I close my last project. I use File -- Add Files to bring the TIF files into Zerene. Once they were in, I use "Stack All, both" to do the stacking. The Dmap stack asks me to set the contrast threshold, and it is not terribly useful on this image.

The Dmap looks a lot nicer than the Pmax (to my taste).

Next, I to to lightroom (back on the windows machine), find the final TIF image in the 2022_minerals folder and import it into lightroom.

I end up with this:

I didn't like this photo, mostly because of the big bright thing in the lower right. So I rearranged the specimen and shot it again. This time I got 73 images to stack.

Again I convert to TIF, pull them into Zerene on linux and stack using both methods. Amazingly I don't want to do any retouching (but later discover there area couple of flares on the left side I could have worked on).

I crop 2290 pixel square, so the field is (18.7/5) * 2290/2592. This is 3.3mm

I decide to go back to Zerene and fix that flare, which is simple enough. Then once I get the new TIF imported into lightroom, I want to make all of the edits (crop and sharpening and everything) that I did to the previous image. It turns out this is easy. I go to the new image in the develop module, click the "previous" button at the lower right, and it is done.