Microscope

[AndrewClark]

Hello,

Would it be possible to develop a microscope simulator in AMS 5?

I would like a screen to appear which would have a circular window, such as one would see when looking through a microscope eyepiece. There would be a control panel which would mimic the functions of a microscope, such as focus, magnification and moving the image around.

I would supply the "slide" images in jpg or gif. The user would select an image from a list and this would appear in the circular window. It would also be handy to have "hot spots" on the images so that when the mouse cursor was over a part of an image a text box would appear describing the relevant part.

Do you think that AMS 5 can do this?

Regards

Andrew

[AGRO]

I think with the combination of AMS5 and Flash you could achieve this. I think you would have to have a good understanding of both also. The controls would be the most difficult part.

[Corey]

Actually it's not that hard. You need to have a huge resolution version of your image and also a version which has been very compressed. Then using Flash you simply create a movie which displays the current swatch of the ultra high res image, but when someone clicks and drags on that image (or uses a control to shift it) the view shifts temporarily to the compressed version until the user drops it (or stops using control) at which time it recalculates the current visible swatch region and shifts back to the hi-res image to those co-ordinates...

I have done this before but I used a combo of Flash and PHP, I'm sure it can be done with Flash and AMS though.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[Bruce]

Hi Andrew-

You could also try a product from Extensis called pxl SmartScale. It works very well for enlarging JPGS in PhotoShop, you could use this in conjunction with these other ideas.

pxl SmartScale

[Corey]

That's quite the claim they make there, scale up 1600% without any visible loss in print quality. I, of course, am a disbeliever in that claim. But I'll check out the demo and see. Thanks for the link Bruce...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[Worm]

I'd like to hear your thoughts Corey. If you wouldn't mind posting them.

[Corey]

Tried it out. Their claim is so incredibly out of the ball park I wouldn't know where to start, but then again I haven't played with it much. All I can say is that out of the box if you resize an image 1600% it is extremely far from being anywhere near the print quality of the original. Perhaps Extensis tested it on fruit bats, I don't know, but certainly not human vision...

To be honest with you none of the products I've seen which claim to do this seem to a better job than Adobe photoshop itself. I use photoshop native resizing to resize everything I do...

Every now and then I hear rumors that the FBI have tools which can do this but they are secret. i don't buy it. The bottom line, you cannot "create" accurate pixels, only a camera can do that, i.e. if I have a photo in which no light data was recorded for a given image, let's say an apple, then it's impossible, by any means, to create a quality image of that apple using my source file, the pixel data simply isn't present...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[AGRO]

I have used this in the past once. It does a pretty good job. They even have a free version.

Zoomify

[Corey]

The sole purpose of Zoomify is to facilitate handling of ultra hi-res images, i.e. some NASA images are several gigabytes in size, it's not a resizing tool. Actually it works exactly like how I mentioned in my first post. They have a base hi-res image, this was always hi-res, not re-sized. Then they have a low res version (or resampled on the fly) for realtime navigation...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[JimS]

Corey, you must be mistaken here. I’ve seen it week after week on TV. It usually goes something like this; all the cops have to go on, is some grainy video captured by a black and white camera at the local 7-11. Back at the lab, the friendly computer geek twists a couple of knobs, while explaining some ‘edge-enhancement’ algorithm he threw together, and presto, he can zoom in far enough to read the inscription on the back of the watch that the suspect is wearing.

In truth, this sort of obvious fakery drives me nuts. I’ve argued with people more than a couple of times trying to explain just what you said, if the pixel information isn’t there, it isn’t there, all the zooming in the world won’t help.

With anti-aliasing, the blocky-ness of edges can by ‘visually’ smoothed when something is enlarged, but you can’t increase actual resolution. The same argument applies to TV sets with 1100 lines of horizontal resolution. If the source video is a DVD (MPEG2), then all that’s there is 640 lines. You can buy expensive line doublers if you want, but the result won’t be any sharper. Though I’m still not sure my brother believes me on that one.

Happy New Years everyone!

[Corey]

Yes, indeed. A very happy new years to you Jim...

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software

[JimS]

I suppose that someone should mention that this is all true with bit-mapped images. If a person is using vector-mapped images like TrueType, or some Flash elements, then you can increase resolution.

[Corey]

True. Raster only mon.

Corey Milner
Creative Director, Indigo Rose Software