Images

What it doesCopy Anchor Link

Opens an image — a gel photograph, a micrograph, a plate scan, a figure — as a real tab in the project, beside the data it belongs to.

When you'd use thisCopy Anchor Link

Two situations, and the second is the one that is hard to solve elsewhere.

The everyday one: the gel photo belongs with the digest that predicted its bands, and the figure belongs with the tables it was drawn from. Keeping them in the project means not hunting through a downloads folder for the picture that goes with the numbers.

The one nothing else handles: a .tif off a microscope. No browser decodes TIFF, and a 16-bit scientific TIFF opened in software that does not expect one usually looks black or empty. This opens it, tells you what the pixels actually span, and lets you choose how they are mapped to the screen.

What this computesCopy Anchor Link

It is a viewer, and the computation that matters is how the pixels are mapped to what you see — which for scientific images is not a display detail but the difference between a visible band and a black frame.

• The intensity window actually applied, always shown, plus the measured range of the image, with a flag when that range is cramped. A camera writing 12-bit samples into a 16-bit file uses a sixteenth of the container, so mapping the whole container renders it nearly black
• The default clips 0.35% of pixels — ImageJ's rule and ImageJ's default — rather than mapping min-to-max, because a few saturated specks would set white and sink the real signal to a fifth of its brightness. Saturation moves that percentage, and 0 gives the plain minimum-to-maximum
• Bit depth and channel layout, the page index for a multi-page TIFF, and the zoom as a multiple of the image's own pixels when Fit is off
• The format from the file's first bytes rather than its name, so a mislabelled file still opens and something that is not an image is refused with that reason instead of drawing a blank. BigTIFF is declined explicitly rather than half-read

What it does not compute: densitometry. Nothing here quantifies a band, and an intensity window is a display mapping, not a measurement of your sample.

Where it livesCopy Anchor Link

Tools → Analyze → Open Image, or the command palette. An image also opens directly from the Files rail and the file manager, and previews in place there. A file picked from another project is copied into the open one so the tab survives a reload.

Inputs and outputsCopy Anchor Link

Takes PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, AVIF and TIFF, recognised from the file's own first bytes rather than its name — so a mislabelled file still opens, and something that is not an image is refused with that reason instead of drawing a blank. BigTIFF is declined explicitly rather than half-read.

There is no output file: this is a viewer.

How to read the resultCopy Anchor Link

Fit scales the image to the pane; turn it off and Zoom draws at a multiple of the image's own pixels. For a multi-page TIFF, Page steps through the images.

For anything deeper than 8 bits, Levels and Saturation are the controls that matter. A camera writing 12-bit samples into a 16-bit file uses a sixteenth of the range, so mapping the whole container shows it nearly black. Mapping it by the darkest and brightest pixel present is not the neutral fix either: a few saturated specks set white, and the real signal sinks to a fifth of the brightness it should have. So the default clips 0.35% of the pixels, which is ImageJ's rule and ImageJ's default — Saturation moves it, and 0 gives the plain minimum-to-maximum. The bar always shows the window actually applied, plus the measured range, and flags a range that cramped. Full detail, and when to reach for each: the image canvas.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link

Sits beside the PDF viewer and the table viewer: the documents and pictures a project accumulates around the sequences it is really about.