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Image Tuning

Image Tuning is used to adjust the image brightness and contrast of your images. This ability is particularly important for UV and SONICC images. You can adjust levels on a per-plate basis, or a per-drop basis, depending on if you are viewing the entire plate with the Canvas tab, or a single drop on the Drop tab.

Example of Tuned Images

 

Image tuning settings can be defined at three levels in Rock Maker: at the global level, at the plate level, and at the drop level. Settings for the uppermost or global level are defined in the Imaging Settings node under the Imaging node in the tree. Global level settings are defined per imaging setting and will be applied every time a plate or drop is imaged with that imaging setting. By default, no imaging settings have tuning settings, as we want to preserve to original image as much as possible. However, you can create custom imaging settings that will apply tuning automatically, saving you time when you view images.

You can override global image tuning settings of a imaging tuning for images of a particular experiment at following two levels:

 
Defining Image Tuning On...Tuning applies to...Overrides
Canvas tabAll images of current experiment belonging to selected imaging setting.Global image tuning settings of an imaging setting.
Drop tabSelected region’s image from current inspection and all of its focus level imagesBoth global and experiment level image tuning settings of an imaging setting.

 

Tuning Images

This is an example of a UV plate that has not been tuned:

LCP UV Drops

To adjust the brightness and contrast so as to better see the contents of the drops, you would use Image Tuning.

 
  1. Click the Tools tab in the Images tab set.

Tuning

 

  1. To level the images, drag the green line to the left of the histogram, and the red line to the right of the histogram. Keep moving the lines until you are satisfied with the image(s) on your screen. Moving the green line further to the right will remove any noise visible from the plate.

Tuned images

  1. You can also level images automatically using the Auto button to the right of the Image Tuning histogram. Clicking the down arrow will allow you to select either auto per drop, or auto per inspection. If you select per drop (the default), then Rock Maker will analyze each drop and adjust the levels to what Rock Maker considers to be the best settings for that drop. If you select per inspection, Rock Maker will aggregate the values from the entire inspection and apply the level settings to every drop on the plate.

Auto button next to Image Tuning histogram

 

Auto-leveling per drop (left) and per inspection (right)

 

Viewing and Ignoring Overrides

On the Canvas and Navigator, images with individual image-level overrides appear with a histogram button at their top-left corner as shown below. "Override" means that the image has been tuned, and you are not viewing the original image.

Drop with leveling override

If you want to ignore the override settings for your images and view the original images, you can toggle the View Overrides button in the Tuning group. If you are viewing leveled images, the View Overrides button appears in blue. If you are viewing the original images, it appears in gray. Toggling this button does not clear leveling from the images.

 

Resetting Image Tuning and Clearing Experiment Level Overrides

You can use the Reset button to either reset tuning settings to their default values so that all image tuning is removed, or to clear experiment level override settings.

If you are on the Drop tab, clicking Reset will clear region image level override settings, if any. If there are no override settings for the current image, tuning settings will be reset to their default values.

If you are on the Canvas tab, clicking Reset will bring up the following dialog:

Reset Image Tuning

You can choose between resetting tuning settings to default values and clearing experiment level overrides here. Select an option and click Reset.

By default, these actions operate on tuning settings related to the current image setting only. Select Do this for all image settings if you want to perform the selected action on all image settings’ tuning settings.

 

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