The use of alternative color coordinates offers opportunities for filtering to achieve improved contrast, both to visually reveal structures that are present and potentially to make them easier to discriminate for subsequent measurement. For example, it is possible to apply an arbitrary color filter to an image after it has been acquired. The brightness of a filtered image is the dot-product of the color vector of each pixel (RGB components) with the color vector of the filter (defined by its hue). In this interactive tutorial, the effect of different filter colors (hues) on images is demonstrated.

The tutorial initializes with a randomly selected specimen appearing in the Specimen Image window. The Choose A Specimen pull-down menu provides a broad selection of colorful specimen images, in addition to the initial randomly chosen one. Experiment with the effect of varying the hue using the Hue Selection slider. When selected, the Maximize Contrast checkbox stretches the dynamic range of the Grayscale Image to its full range.

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