Features
NIH Image conforms well to the Macintosh user interface standard, and is visually
and graphically oriented, making it easy to use with little experience. For example,
NIH Image has a palette of tools for drawing, measuring and examining images which
are fully described in the
"Tools" section of the NIH Image manual.
A variety of measurements can be made on
user-specif ied regions of interest and results exported to a spread sheet or plotting
package. The LUT (color look up table) and Map windows allow control of the
video lookup table, providing flexible contrast enhancement and false color. The
Info window displays cursor position, pixel values, selection size, line length,
etc. Images, look-up tables, macros and convolution kernels can be opened by dragging
them to the NIH Image icon.
System requirements
NIH Image requires a Mac II or later with 8 MB or more of RAM. (Running NIH Image
on a 4 MB Mac is a struggle.) System 7 or later is also required for versions 1.56 and later (because of the plug-ins and 24-bit to 8-bit color conversion), and for many of
these examples. A Power PC native version is available as well as a non-FPU version
for Macs without a floating-point co-processor.
NIH Image Users
There is an active electronic mailing list on the Internet with over 1000 subscribers
and a dozen messages or so a day covering topics such as a) news of the latest
versions of NIH Image b) special purpose macros c) image processing tips using
NIH Image d) hardware - frame grabbers e) bugs, wish list items. Subscribe to the list
by sending the one line message "subscribe nih-image <first name> <last name>"
to listproc@soils.umn.edu.
Starting up and configuring
Select the Monitors
control panel in the Control Panels
folder (from the Apple - Control Panels
menu) and set the display to 256 colors. (Versions of NIH Image 1.55 and later
will work with other monitor settings, but the appearance of the images may differ
from those described here, and the performance of NIH Image may be degraded.
In the Finder, click once on the NIH Image icon and use the File - Get Info
command
to set the preferred size to 4000K. Leave NIH Image in a folder that also contains
the macros folder and plug-ins folder. Make an alias of NIH Image and move it
to either the Apple Menu items folder (in the System folder) or the desktop. To
start up, do one of the following actions to either the NIH Image icon or its alias: double
click it, select it in the Apple Menu, drag and drop one or more selected images
onto it, or double click on an image that is an NIH Image document. Which application (such
as NIH Image) 'owns' the file can be displayed by going to the finder, selecting
the file by clicking on it, and using the File - Get Info
command or pressing the command-I keys.
In the event of the error message that there was not enough room for various buffers,
use the Options - Preferences
command in NIH Image to set the Undo and Clipboard buffers to 300K. (The Clipboard
and Undo buffers don't need to be larger than the largest example image. You
may have obtained a preferences file along with NIH Image, which might have preferences
different from those recommended for these examples. ) Also make sure that the
Invert Pixel Values box is checked so that black = 0 and white = 255. Save the
preferences using File - Record Preferences
, Quit
and restart NIH Image.