Chuck,
Last time, I went on about my fitting pictures together when my microscope doesn’t have a low enough power. That’s when the object is too big to fit into the field of view at my lowest power – with best image settings (least distortion, best resolution etc.) I take pictures of portions of the object then electronically paste them together to get an image of the whole item – usually a large chondrule.
There are probably a lot of programs that will fit puzzle pieces together for you. I use two that came to me by chance. One was free with my first digital camera, a Canon. It’s called PhotoStitch. The other is Adobe’s CS4 high power Photoshop. This was a gift from my kid(!). As you’d expect, CS4 is pretty sweet. But sometimes it gets confused when there is a lot of black space in the pictures. Then I fall back on PhotoStitch.
I also use stitching / merging with higher magnifications. Again, I am compensation for not having high grade optics with a variety of magnifications. In this case features in images at my “regular” magnification are too small. That is, when you enlarge them to fill the viewing frame they’re blurry. My fix is to up the microscope’s power (which too often over fills the field of view) and take a set of pictures to cover the feature in question. Merge, trim and show off.
Let me show you.
John
