Martin Microscope now offers Syncroscopy Automontage
software!
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For several years now, we've been impressed by the
incredible images produced with Automontage systems. Many of our
customers have wished for this capability, but thought it was
financially out of reach. We were recently surprised to learn that
while fully automated systems can cost $40,000.00 or more, the basic
software is available in a stand-alone version for as little as
$995.00! This is the real thing - Syncroscopy Automontage
software.
The fully focused image to the right is a composite of
42 separate images manually captured sequentially, saved, and processed
by Automontage software. The original images are 1360x1024 pixels
captured using a Scion CFW-1308
color firewire camera with ImageJ software and a standard
stereomicroscope. The Automontage software first aligned all 42
images to compensate for the parallax which is normal in
stereomicroscopy, then blended the best focused parts of each image into
the final, fully focused result. The final image was then levels
adjusted in Photoshop.
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Praying mantis at 50x optical magnification taken with Scion CFW1308C
camera, Leica MZ12.5 stereomicroscope,
fiberoptic ring illuminator
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Automontage software is available in two versions:
Automontage Essentials: $995.00
Automontage
Pro:
$3,995.00
The Essentials version has basic automontage capability with two
blending modes, while the Pro version offers six blending modes and adds
screen calibration and measuring functions.
The image to the right was acquired during our first demo of this
software. Thanks to Jim Franks and Adrienne Russell of GCRL for
permission to use this image of their specimen, Cerataspis.
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Cerataspis at 7x optical magnification taken with Scion CFW1308C
camera, Olympus SZH stereomicroscope, fiberoptic dual arm illuminator |
At this time, Automontage software only directly
controls a couple of quite expensive digital cameras, but ANY digital
camera can be used to manually acquire the image series. For the
pseudoscorpion claw at right, we used a Sony
Cybershot F717 consumer digital camera with our MM99-58
adapter to capture eight sequential images, adjusting the focus manually
for each image. Consumer digital cameras are great for this kind
of work because they automatically save images with sequentially
numbered file names. We took the Memory Stick out of the camera,
plugged it into the PC card reader, opened the image folder with
Automontage, and let the software do its thing. It was very
fast and easy from start to finish.
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Pseudoscorpion claw at 500x optical magnification taken with Sony
F717 camera with MM99-58 adapter, Jenaval
Apo DIC microscope. |
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