In the world of fluorescent imaging, the need to colorize grayscale images can be an everyday task. Yet, when all too many of these colorized images go to publication, the results appear to contain undifferentiated blobs of a saturated color, rather than images that contain gradations of color.

While very small objects need to be as bright as possible in order to make these objects apparent (e.g. bacteria under low magnification), and while too many push the gain on photomultiplier tubes in order to top grayscale values off at 255 (on an 8-bit range) in order to show unquestionable colocalization, only the former can be defended on the basis of revealing lost features.