Viewing Images
Click any image in a collection to open the viewer. Everything here changes how the image looks on your screen and nothing about the file, so you can push a dim channel as far as you like and still be looking at your original data.
Moving Around
Scroll to zoom and drag to pan. + zooms in, - zooms out, and 0 fits the image to the window. Past about 4× the image stops being smoothed so you're looking at real pixels rather than an interpolation.
The left and right arrow keys step through the collection, and the up and down arrows step through a z-stack's slices. The sidebar shows where you are in the collection and lets you jump to any position.
Details in the sidebar gives the image's dimensions in pixels and, where the file knows its calibration, in micrometres, along with its slice, channel, and frame counts, original filename, file size, format, and when it was taken.
Enhance
The Enhance panel adjusts how the image is displayed.
Presets are the fastest route to a usable picture:
| Preset | For |
|---|---|
| See Weak Signals | Bringing up faint fluorescence |
| Publication Ready | A clean, honest-looking rendering |
| High Contrast | Making boundaries obvious, useful before counting |
| Auto-Optimize | Letting Conspecta pick from the image itself |
B&W and Invert sit alongside them as toggles, and a Color LUT applies a lookup table: Fire, Ice, Viridis, Magma, Plasma, Inferno, or Green Fire Blue. Each says what it's good for, and Viridis is the one to reach for in a paper, since it's colorblind-safe and reproduces properly in greyscale.
Adjustments below that gives you the individual sliders: brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, warmth, and tint, all running from −100 to 100, gamma from 0.2 to 5.0 with 1.0 as neutral, and blackpoint, clarity, sharpness, denoise, and deconvolution from 0 upward. Each carries a line saying what it does.
At the bottom, hold View Original to see the untouched image for as long as you hold it, and Reset All to drop everything at once.
Fluorescence Channels
An image with more than one channel gets channel controls in the sidebar. Toggle a channel's visibility, change its color, and open a channel row for three adjustments specific to it:
- Gain for that channel's brightness alone
- Contrast, an adaptive local enhancement that pulls detail out of flat regions
- Flatten, which evens out uneven background illumination
Merge shows every visible channel composited together. Split lays them out side by side, which is how you check that a signal is really in the channel you think it is.
Z-Stacks
A z-stack gets a slice stepper, and a Projection control with three ways to flatten it: Maximum Intensity for the brightest value through the stack, Average, or Sum. Leave it on Individual Slices to move through the stack one plane at a time.
Choosing a projection locks the slice stepper, since a projection is every slice at once and stepping through it would mean nothing.
3D View renders the stack as a volume you can rotate by dragging and zoom by scrolling. Its controls are Transparency, Layer Spacing to stretch or compress the z axis, and Auto-Rotate for a hands-free turn, plus a background color and per-channel selection.
Timelapses
An image series with timepoints gets a transport bar: first frame, previous, play and pause, next, last, and a scrub slider, with the current frame numbered against the total. Playback speed runs from 0.25× to 8×, and the loop mode switches between playing once, repeating, and ping-ponging back and forth, which is often the clearest way to show a slow process.
Presenting
The Present panel has what you need to show an image to someone else:
- Slideshow puts the collection full screen, one image at a time
- 3D View for a z-stack
- Screenshot Region captures part of the view
- Download Current saves the image as you've set it up, enhancements and all
In the slideshow, Space plays and pauses, the arrow keys step, and Esc exits. Set an interval between 2 and 30 seconds for a hands-off loop, or leave it off and drive it yourself. The controls fade out after a few seconds and come back when you move the mouse. A z-stack slide offers View 3D in the corner.
Extra Panels
Display turns on floating panels over the image:
- Histogram for the intensity distribution, which is how you tell a saturated channel from a bright one
- Minimap for where you are when zoomed in
- Zoom for the current magnification
Your choices here are remembered, so a histogram you like having open stays open next time.