Annotate and Crop Images
Marking up an image is how you point at the thing you're talking about: the cell that divided, the boundary that moved, the artifact everyone should ignore. The tools are in the Annotate panel of the image viewer, and the same set is used wherever Conspecta hands you an image to mark up, including figure panels and exported plot trees.
Drawing
The panel's Draw section has five shapes plus a scale bar:
- Brush for freehand strokes
- Rectangle and Ellipse, drawn by dragging
- Polygon, also drawn by dragging, which closes the path when you let go
- Arrow, for pointing at something
- Scale Bar, for the bar every micrograph needs
An arrow's two ends are set separately. Each can be plain, standard, filled, diamond, or a circle, so a double-headed arrow across a distance and a single-headed pointer at a cell are the same tool.
Below the shapes are the styling controls that apply to whatever you draw next, or to the shape you have selected: Style for stroke width from 1 to 50 pixels and opacity, Color, and a Fill toggle with its own color and a way to clear it.
Tip: In the image viewer a scale bar is labelled in pixels. When you mark up an image inside a figure panel, where the image's calibration is known, the bar is labelled in real units instead. Do your publication scale bars in the figure.
Labelling
The Label section adds text rather than shapes.
Text places a label you type, with its own size control running from 8 to 100 pixels.
Counter stamps a numbered marker each time you click, incrementing as it goes, which is the honest way to hand-count a field. Set the next number yourself or Reset to 1 to start a fresh tally.
Editing What You've Drawn
The Arrange tool selects, moves, resizes, and rotates anything already on the image. It stays disabled until there's something to arrange.
Eraser removes individual annotations. Delete All clears the image, and asks first.
Cmd/Ctrl + Z undoes and Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Z redoes. Undo is shared across everything you've done to the image in this session, so it walks back through annotations, enhancements, channel changes, and crops in the order you made them.
Cropping
The Crop tool draws a region to keep, with rulers along the edges so you can be precise about it.
Cropping is a viewing convenience, not an edit. The result lives in your browser for this image, so the stored file is untouched and your collaborators still see the full frame. To publish a crop, crop the image inside a figure panel, where the framing is saved as part of the figure.