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Using the iImage Tool

The iImage tool is a powerful option for visualizing and manipulating image data. Unlike the command line-oriented visualizations shown previously, with iImage, a single command will give you a fully interactive environment.

Displaying an Image

Using our same TIFF data, follow these steps:

  1. At the IDL Command Line, enter iImage.

    2.  

  2. As shown in Reading and Writing Data, select File  Open and from the examples\data directory choose a file named image.tif.

    3.  

  3. Select Open, and the file is displayed in iImage.

    4.  

    Figure 6-1: TIFF Data View of Manhattan in the iImage Tool

    Figure 6-1: TIFF Data View of Manhattan in the iImage Tool

Modifying Images

The iImage tool allows you many options for modifying and manipulating your images, for example the Data Window on the iImage tool allows you to adjust and manipulate the image brightness by changing the RGA or indexed channel values. For indexed color images, Channel 0 represents the image data values. For RGBA images, Channel 0 represents the red values, Channel 1 represents the green values and Channel 2 represents the blue values. Within each channel is a red bar representing minimum values and a green bar representing maximum values. You can click on each bar in each channel (which are tabbed) to manipulate these values.

Other options are available in iImage such as displaying multiple images, manipulating image color and lighting as well as brightness and contrast, filtering, resampling, morphing, surfacing, adding contours, and annotating among other things. For much more information on working with the iImage tool, see Working with Images. The following sections show how to duplicate some of the iImage tool functionality at the command line using direct graphics.

  IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)