Advances in digital technology now allow photomicrographs for taxonomic illustration to be prepared that are in focus through multiple planes. The narrow depth of field in ordinary photomicrographs meant that in the past illustrations had to be prepared by hand to represent key structures or body parts adequately.
Modern software coupled with microscope - video camera equipment enables successive video images to be captured at different focus planes and then combined. The combination can be done manually, using recent versions of such commercial software as Adobe Photoshop® or Adobe Illustrator®, or automatically by Auto-Montage® software, which also is commercially available (see http://www.synoptics.co.uk).