Combining colors from grayscale microscope images

[vanveen]

Hello all!

I am a scientist who has traditionally used the Adobe software for my (fairly limited) needs - but have recently been trying out affinity products and liking them.

One thing I cannot figure out is how to combine grayscale images into a single RGB image. This is a common task when doing microscopy - good fluorescence microscopy cameras are generally grayscale and capture colors one at a time. Then we often need to overlay these grayscale images, displaying each image as a different color channel. 

Is this easy to do in Affinity (maybe photo?) - in photoshop it was as simple as copying the grayscale image and pasting into a specific color channel. 

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Dan C]

Hi vanveen,

Welcome to the forums  

This has been asked previously on our forums, please see this below thread - 

I hope this helps!

[Salamander]

I figured out work-around for this and wrote up a protocol for my students. This is Day 1 for me on Affniity Photo, so there are probably better ways. However I got a few good quality merged photos out of this already and am happy to have found this software. 

 

Merge Black and White with Fluorescent in Affinity Photo

Open both documents and Go To documents > Resize Document to check on the size, units, and DPI

Then open a new 16bit sRGB with the same size, units, and DPI. (Make certain both of your original documents have the same size, units, and DPI).

Use Cmmd A and Cntrl C to Use Copy and paste your black and white image and your fluorescent image into the new document. Your fluorescent image needs to be on the top layer. Drag and drop it there if needed. 

Below the layers find the “Channels” tab and double click one of the two channels that you want to remove (e.g. with a red image you want to remove the blue and green channels). Use Cmmd A and “delete” to remove these color channels.

Now move your black and white layer to the top and set its Opacity (above the layers) to 50%.

Double click the fluorescent channel Go To Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Levels. Move the white slider to 50% and the Gamma to 1.4.

Go To Documents>Flatten
Use the Free hand selection tool to outline your ROI. Go To Select > Refine Selection to soften edges. Copy and paste selection into a new layer. 

Use the rectangle tool to draw a new black rectangle across the background layer and re flatten the image.