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Photoshop and 12-bit Digital Microscope Camera Images

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Brent Neal
Brent Neal*
Affiliation:
Reindeer Graphics, Inc.
*
[email protected]

Extract

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One problem facing owners of high-end digital microscope cameras and scanners is dealing with 12-bit TIFF format images. Because of a vagueness in the TIFF specification [1], some prograins do not load 12-bit TIFF images at all, or do not handle them gracefully. Unfortunately, Adobe Photoshop is one such program.

A common problem with 12-bit images that do load in Photoshop is that the image appears to be totally black once loaded. This occurs when the camera stores the most significant bits of the image in the lower 12-bits of a 16-bit data space. Photoshop, when converting to its internal 16-bit representation, does not scale these properly, resulting in a low contrast image. This can present problems with viewing the images, or performing any processing or measurement steps that you might desire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Microscopy Today , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , March 2004 , pp. 24 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 2004

References

References and Notes

1. The TIFF 6 specification can be found at http://partners.adobe,com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/TIFF6,pdf

2. Photoshop, in actuality, does not supports true 16-bit space, but rather a 15 bit+ 1 space. In 16 bit mode, the maximum grey value for a pixel is 32768. There have been several discussions of this in the Photoshop forums at the Adobe website.

3. The Reindeer Graphics Custom plug-in provides 16-bit support in Photoshop 7 and earlier, a larger neighborhood, the ability to enter floating point kernels, and an optional autoscale function. It also works in Photoshop-compatible programs as well.