In the good old days, when microscopists wanted to show others what they had found, they either drew by hand what they saw or hired someone to do same. Besides manual dexterity, and eye-hand coordination, drawing of course requires artistic interpretation, i.e. at least a smidgen of imagination. As a result one always had to be concerned with the objectively of rendering. Such concerns were more or less put to rest once the proper use of photography became established. The manual dexterity was reduced to twisting the focus knob, squeezing the shutter button without also shaking the camera and doing some handwaving in the dark room (artistic interpretation), surprisingly all non-trivial operations.

Today we have entered a different phase yet in the process of sharing morphological information, a phase characterized by digital recording and along with it, digital image processing. The digits now are not literally fingers anymore, but the numbers they stand for Digital image recording and processing was originally devised to improve the quality of images returned by spacecraft and used to require highly sophisticated computing facilities.