We have a lot of software, both professional/consumer and scientific. Schedule a free consultation to discuss the specifics of your project or to customize analysis.
Image Analysis
There is a lot of professional/consumer (‘pro-sumer’) software to adjust photographs, such as Photoshop. They’re great for composing images for figures, but they are extremely dangerous for novices to process scientific images. Red-eye correction of your infant nephew is fine, but red-color correction on fluorescent co-localization is not. Never use their automatic features unless you know that they do identical adjustments (quantitatively) to all images of a set (i.e., z-stack), including images of control specimens. Scientific image processing software is smarter and will process a whole z-stack correctly, but not necessarily associated images of control specimens.
Comparison of Software
- Basic Adjustments: Adjust brightness/contrast; resize images; crop images; overlay annotations (identifying text, scale bar, etc.)
- Basic Analysis: Calculate average brightness of whole image or of portions (rectangular/elliptical regions-of-interest, hand-traced oddly shaped regions-of-interest), scattergram plots for colocalization analysis, particle-counting (segmentation by simple thresholds)
- Advanced Analysis: Various advanced functions such as tracking particle motions over time, trace neurons in 3D, select/process volumes in 3D
- Programmable: Ability to automate functions, even add new capabilities, to package. Some packages, such as Volocity, offer graphical programming, allowing non-programmers the ability to automate functionality.
Package (Mfr) Class Purpose Ease-of-use Basic Adjust-ments Basic Analysis Advanced Analysis Programmability Photo software (not scientific; professional/consumer grade) Illustrator (Adobe) Pro-sumer Vector-based drawing; Image layout; Submission of composite images for publication Moderate Yes No No Yes, but not scientific PhotoShop (Adobe) Pro-sumer Pixel-based drawing; Submission of individual images for publication Yes (basic functions) Yes No No Yes, but not scientific IrfanView Consumer Shareware clone of Photoshop Yes (basic functions) Yes No No No Scientific software, both image acquisition and image analysis Zen (Zeiss) Scientific Image acquisition & analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes
(MicFac: deconvolution, FCS)No Slidebook (3i) Scientific Image acquisition & analysis Yes Yes Yes Some
(MicFac: deconvolution)No
(indirect with MatLab)Metamorph (Molecular Devices) Scientific Image acquisition & analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes
(MicFac: neuron tracing)Yes
(Custom language)Volocity (Perkin Elmer) Scientific Image analysis (MicFac does not have acquisition license) Yes Yes Yes Yes
(MicFac: deconvolution)Graphical MetaXpress (Molecular Devices) Scientific High-Content Image analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes AcuityXpress (Molecular Devices) Scientific High-Content Database analysis use after MetaXpress analysis Moderate N/A Yes Yes Yes Scientific software, image analysis ONLY Fiji/ImageJ (NIH) Scientific Shareware Image analysis Yes Yes Yes Some Yes
(Java)Arivis Scientific Image visualization (MicFac does not have analysis license) Yes Yes Yes
(MicFac does not have analysis license)Yes
(MicFac does not have analysis license)No Imaris (Bitplane, MicFac copies) Scientific Image analysis Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
(C, C++, MatLab)Imaris Viewer (Bitplane, free) Scientific Image analysis Yes Yes 3D View only No No MatLab (Mathworks) Scientific Image analysis (MicFac does not have acquisition license) Moderate Yes Yes Yes Yes Microvolution (Microvolution) Scientific High-speed (GPU) Deconvolution Yes N/A N/A N/A Some Igor (WaveMetrics) Scientific Image analysis, AFM data Moderate Yes Yes Yes Yes Note: never use software to increase pixels/µm (increase image resolution). OK to reduce image resolution.