I bought an 18F extension tube, it’s specifically made for the Adaptall-2 SP 90mm f/2.5. Had a go with it in the garden this afternoon and I am quite pleased for a first try.
Interested to see how others would process this.
This file is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal. You are free to do with it whatever you wish.
DSC_5420.nef (19.0 MB)
I can’t check your xmp just now, but yours does look sharper than mine. Looks good, how do you tackle sharpening?
Also, I think I prefer how you have desaturated the red flower.
Thanks. I used only Demosaic Capture Sharpening and Diffuse or Sharpen > Lens Deblur
Personally, I think yours looks just as sharp.
DT 5.7 xmp I tried to unsuccessfully (in my view) work on the unsharp head of the bee. The bums in great focus. Hard creatures to photograph.
DSC_5420.nef.xmp (39.4 KB)
Fixed the left wing blowout by mirror blending/clone/heal. A few other things to enhance sharpness as well. Rotated and cropped. 
Nice sharpness Lyle. What tricks did you use?
Used the following G’MIC presets with selective blend throughs to reduce noise.
Used Dehaze (dup layer) with reduced opacity to slightly darken the left eye as well as saturate the overall image, used Local Variance Normalization selectively to sharpen parts of the image (set threshold to 10 to reduce noise, but still selective since it’s, well, this presset is quite an obtuse one), and Mighty Details for overall sharpening. Looking at this with less tired eyes, which I would have addressed the grayish artifact color in the flower (forget what that issue is called and too lazy to look it up). lol
Was going to do my usually silliness, but too tired to come up with anything clever/good so kept it a photo retouch (not to mention, have to do so from time to time so that you folk not think I’m completely a nut; lol).
Thanks for the feedback, Terry.
I did notice the head was out of focus. I am new to this, so lots to work on. I planted a small patch of wild flowers this year so hopefully I will get plenty of opportunity to practice.
I personally prefer manual focus for macro to ensure the part of the insect I want is in focus rather then what auto focus might select. Still very hard to focus on bees and similar so don’t beat yourself up.
