Dear All,
Some time ago, I asked for advice on manipulating TIFF images on a SUN
workstation. This is a followup post with a clarification to the original
problem.
Many people replied suggesting that we use either xv, xpaint or Photoshop.
Well, Photoshop is out of the window right from the start because we
certainyl acan't justify the cost for the limited usage that we would get
from it. We tried xv and xpaint, but got the same problem with them that
we had seen on a Macintosh, namely the image was distorted.
This problem apparently arises because the image was derived from an
Amersham BaseScanner and has been scanned with differing horizontal and
vertical resolutions. Unfortunately, most software does not recognise the
(seemingly non-standard) tags that identify the resolutions and so the
image is distorted.
Aldus Freehand (on the Mac) does read in the image OK, but obviously it
cannot be manipulated. So far, we have not found a package that will do
the job. Aldus SuperPaint (or whoever has the licence to distribute and
market SuperPaint now that Adobe have decided to bin it from Aldus'
product line) may do the job correctly and affordably, but we haven't got
hold of a copy to try it. Likewise Canvas may also do the job, but that is
getting a bit more pricy.
NIH Image also doesn't cut the mustard, and even if someone had the time
to add in the code to import the particular flavour of TIFF that we
currently had, the lack of scroll bar support on the Image window would
make dealing with these images quite tricky 'cos they are quite enormous.
I have found a shareware utility that will read in the file and allow me
to non-proportionally scale it to display in the correct proportions
on-screen. However, it won't let me save the altered image in its altered
form, nor can I cut out regions of interest in a sufficiently
high-resolution form.
Any more ideas anyone?
Alternatively, is there anyone out there using Canvas 3.5 or SuperPaint
3.5 that would be prepared to accept a 1.5MB stuffed binhexed image by
email or ftp to try out on their machine to see if those apps can do what
we want them to do?
TIA,
--
Andy Law
( Andy.Law @ bbsrc.ac.uk )
( Big Nose in Edinburgh )
