Macro insect photo editing workflow

- I'm here once again with Bob Sober, bug photographer. Bob's actually a human being, he's not a bug photographer. Anyway, Bob, last week we talked about how you shoot with the rig and now we wanna talk about post-production. And what you've got up here is one stacked piece of what will ultimately be a bigger bug. So this is about 100 images that you stacked together. - [Bob] Yes, right at about 100. - [Man In Blue Shirt] The detail is astonishing. We're seeing this much detail already and we're only at 16% zoom level.

If you go into 100% it's just fascinating. I see exactly what you meant before about normally you just squish these things, to actually see this incredible mottling. - You see every little, all these little divots, my architecture engineering part of me gets into, I know that this is a moving piece, actually what I'm looking at is a moving piece, it's a cover over his wing, so it can be lifted up and moved off to the side and it actually would flap a little bit.

So on my analysis of that is that every divot adds structural strength, that's what it's there for. And you'll see some hairs here, there's a little hair, there's a little hair. And then here's a little piece of dust I just didn't get off. And then you can see this kind of staining every now and then on this. And at least it looks like staining to me, but anyway, it's part of the color on this thing. And they're just incredible, it's incredible that we can even see this stuff.

- It's fantastic, the level of detail you're getting here is amazing. Your stack is also so clean. I know from experience that a lot of times when you're stacking if you get your overlap of stack wrong you end up with fuzzy spots and weird places in the image. You've plainly got more than enough overlap, you've nailed the actual stack, it's sharp all the way through. Was that trial and error? Or, you've got your depth of field chart here, you're just measuring it out? - I'm, I'll figure it, well, the depth of field chart will tell me what the true depth is and I usually cut that in half.

- Oh, in half? Okay, that's a lot. - So I'll double the number of shots that you have to have in order to do it, but then you don't end up with any problems. - Yeah, you definitely don't. - And after you've shot 1,000 photographs you want it to come out right. (laughs) You don't wanna discover the problems after you've shot 1,000 photographs. - How long does it take to do this, to shoot this 1,000? - Well, this one stack, this one stack it takes only about between five and 10 minutes to actually shoot it.

- That's great. - So once you've got the auto, if you've got some automation built into it, like what we discussed then you can, I can do something else. Sometimes I'll be editing one stack while I'm actually photographing another. - Okay. I meant to ask you this last week when we were talking about shooting, I heard you take a picture on the rig earlier and you've got the mirror locked up. Is that right? - Right, that's correct. - Really doing everything you can to reduce vibration.

- Oh yeah. - Which explains the sharpness. So you've still got a background in the image. I guess that's whatever your table is. What's gonna happen with that? - Well, now I've tried, I've worked really hard to try to not have backgrounds in them, to have a smooth background, and for me it's just impossible. So a lot of it is created in the backing itself and trying to get the really fine detail that you've got on this thing. So when I've assembled the insect, and then I can mask off the background.

So it's one more process you have to go through, but it's been well worthwhile. - What are you using as a masking tool? Are you painting it by hand? - Well, I'm using a piece of software that I found has a great masking function in it and has really very, it's been really good. Because the problem gets to be, the general masking is easy, but when you get to that, and you've got a kind of a yellowish or a tan hair and you wanna keep it, but you wanna mask everything else off.

And I've had a lot of trouble making that happen. You want the edge to be hard as you can get it. So I couldn't do that. I actually even tried, I tried erasing the background, I've tried everything, but I found a software package that does a really good job on it and that's what I use all the time. It's still gonna be three or four hours to mask a bug. - And what's the software? - It's ON1.

- Oh, the ON1 masking. Yeah, they're very good. I'm still just shocked at the detail, that hair is sitting in there. The next question is, so this is straight out of the camera, it's stacked, what's our color accuracy like at this point? - Well, I haven't modified the color at all. And you can see, it's really very strong on it. - [Man In Blue Shirt] It's very saturated.

- But in the end, if I see that this final assembled image is not as saturated as I thought it should have been, as I was, so much of this is judgement call, but what are you judging, what are you judging it against? And what I'm judging it against is the image that I see on this LCD screen as I'm assembling this thing. I've gotta start off with an insect and I'm gonna try to recreate it at a scale that is 30 to 60 times the size of the insect.

The final print will be about as much as 60, maybe even a little bit more. And so the saturation is, you can lose some of the saturation when you get it up that size, you can lose some of the contrast, so once I've, once everything else is done and I've masked the background off, so I have no background, then I'll take a look at the saturation again and then I'll take a look at the contrast again, and I may adjust that a little bit. I don't do any fooling around with the hue, and so when people ask me, is this the real colors? Yes, I'd say, it is.

- You've got a microscope set up over here with some bugs underneath it and I was looking at it earlier. And it's shocking with the naked eye through this microscope in real time to see how saturated the colors are and how brightly lit they are. Part of that is you're shining a lot of light on them, and they're iridescent by nature, so I expect the color shifts as you get more light on it. So you're dealing with a pretty saturated lighting color environment anyway here. Outside in the real world under sunlight they may not look this super saturated, but this is not actually false color, it is, under this lighting this is what they look like.

- Correct, yeah. It's all reflected light, everything that we're shooting here is all reflected light. - You mentioned earlier something that's interesting, I just wanna get in here, that this is a scar. - [Bob] Oh yes. - [Man In Blue Shirt] This thing is a scar. Do you find much of that on the? - Yes, all these-- - These bugs have a story. - Oh yes, they all do, and it's really very, it's interesting. And when I first saw it I thought, oh gosh, how am I gonna, what am I gonna do with this? Because now, is this insect really not material that is good enough for me to wanna spend time photographing anyway? And I thought, not at all.

I really, they've all got something on them that is life. They had to crawl through something, or they had to crawl under something, or they had a fight with another insect, or something. And those are some of the neatest things that end up on these insects. - It is interesting, as soon as you pointed that out and said what it was, you immediately get the sense of, oh, we just think of bugs just out there, just living this bug world where they're just being annoying and they're having drama. (laughs) It's really fascinating.

So let's see the big reveal here. You've actually got, you've got a finished one, or you've got this bug finished where you've assembled all of the pieces. And this is just shocking in so many different ways. One, it's a really beautiful bug and I'm not really a big beetle person, but this is, the blues are incredible, this fade out to the red there at the end is really interesting. - Oh, yeah, he happens to be a really, really nice one. But an also really common one. When you see, it's not unlike people will wear, insect wings covers like this have been used in a lot of things, including earrings, and the first show I did I had one of the other artists at the show who was displaying actually insects and she actually came at this from the fabric world.

And so what she said, she was in Africa and one person came out wearing a tribal robe and when he opened it up it was nothing but these insect wings on the, the cut wing covers, and it was so beautiful that she started going down the path of insects and away from just looking at fabrics. - Interesting, wow. So how many, how many tiles is this? - [Bob] Well, I think this one would be about, it's two wide and it's a nice seven long, so probably, so 14, so around 1,400 photographs just to assemble this thing.

And the final file is huge though. - It is, we're seeing one and 1/2 gigabytes down here. For those of you keeping track at home, this image, as we're seeing it right now, is 3% magnification. That's how huge this thing is. It's astonishing. I'm confused a little bit as to how you're assembling the different tiles. Are you doing that by hand? Or are you use? - Well, I'm using Photoshop. - Okay, but are you having Photoshop do Photo Merge as if you were stitching a panorama? - Yes. - Oh wow, and that really works. - It really works, no kidding.

It does a great job. - Wow, it really does, 'cause I don't see seams and it's corrected all the perspective, just as it would on a real panorama. Something we didn't talk about before when you were shooting, you've posed this bug. - Yes. - It doesn't just naturally strike such a great pose So you've positioned the antenna in this jaunty angle, that's quite handsome, I have to say. (laughs) You've positioned the legs. How much time does that take? - [Bob] It gets shorter with experience, like everything else.

- [Man In Blue Shirt] Okay, you've got an aesthetic for bug posing now, is that right? - That's right, that's right. As you pin the bug and when I first met an artist that was doing some other things with pinning bugs and I said, well gosh, I'm spending an hour doing a single insect. It's just eating up my day. And they said, "Well I get to where I can do it "in 10 minutes now." And so, well some of them I spend more than an hour still, but some of them go right into the right place very easily too.

- Right, right. This is just beautiful. I wanna just really quickly before we leave here, I'm dying to see the eyes. - [Bob] Oh yeah. - [Man In Blue Shirt] Can we zoom in on that? That looks like a real. - [Bob] Well, let's just take him all the way up to 400. - [Man In Blue Shirt] Should we just do it? Okay, that's 400. - [Bob] One, two, three, there we are. - [Man In Blue Shirt] There we are, alright. - [Bob] And right here, look at, the unexpected texture that's across his back. - [Man In Blue Shirt] Will you sharpen this at all when you output it? - [Bob] When I output it, sometimes and sometimes not.

It depends. Most of the time, no. - [Man In Blue Shirt] Oh my goodness. - [Bob] There's what his eye looks like. And each one of those little bumps is an eye. So the compound eyes are incredible. And what I wanna do, what gets me really quick is that I don't, I wanna reach in there and move this stuff off his eyes. You shouldn't have anything in your eye. - [Man In Blue Shirt] No, no, he's got floaters.

- [Bob] But he's got covering, it's covered. - [Man In Blue Shirt] Can we go back actually to the mandible? Everything about this is interesting, so it. Wow. - So there's his mouth, and then this is the beginning of his antenna. And every joint in his body will be a ball joint. So it ends like that and then wraps around it. - Yeah, yeah, ball and socket. How, after you shot one of these things do you just sit here for a while just roaming around it? These textures are fascinating and the little things that you see.

- Well, look at that, look at that pattern. Isn't that incredible? Yeah, but I'm gonna be spending days with it before I get to the end. And it's a, there are some tedious processes. Some bits, some of it's really easy and some of it gets to be a little tedious. And the parts that probably are not as much fun are looking at these hairs, so you've got hair that's covering a body depth that might be a whole millimeter, yeah, all that far.

And so one overlaps the other, and which ones, you wanna see them all, but you wanna see them also in an understandable way. So it's difficult to capture all of that. - Yeah, this is where you're going next, you're gonna be styling bug hair. I can see that. - That's right. - And that's actually a testament to kind of where we started this conversation in a much earlier Practicing Photographer about you were never an entomologist, you were never that interested in bugs, you got struck by something and it made you interested in going real deep here and starting this project that has gone so far and so extreme.

I'd like to stress that again, is this is great thing for any photographer to do on any subject matter is to go really this deep. Bob, seeing all this work has been incredibly inspiring, I really appreciate you taking the time to show us all this. If you wanna see more of his work you can take a look at his website where you can prowl around a bunch of these incredibly beautiful insect photos. Thanks again Bob. - Thank you very much.