How can I get a question answered?
Hundreds of questions about NIH Image have been asked and answered on the NIH Image mailing list, which is subscribed to by over 1000 NIH Image users. You can see if your question has come up on the list by doing a keyword search of the list archives at:
You can also browse the monthly list archives at:
How do I (un)subscribe to the NIH Image mailing list?
The NIH Image mailing list is a forum to post and answer questions
concerning NIH Image and its use. There are over a thousand subscribers to the list. Subscription and all mail routing is done via a listproc server
at the University of Minnesota.
Subscribe to the NIH Image mailing list by sending a message containing the line:
I don't want a ton of email but I want to subscribe, how?
You can set your subscription to "digest" mode, which
collects all the daily messages (sometimes there will be very many) and
sends it out once per day. Send an email message to listproc@soils.umn.edu with the command:
Does NIH Image run on a PC?
Scion Corporation is porting NIH Image to Windows 95. See the
"What's New?" section of the NIH Image home page for more information. NIH Image also runs under DOS, Linux, or NextStep using the Executor Mac emulator from Ardi (http://www.ardi.com).
Is there a UNIX version of NIH Image?
NIH Image has not been ported to UNIX but it runs on SUN and HP workstations
using Apple's Mac emulator for UNIX called Macintosh Application Environment
(MAE). Information about MAE is available from
"http://www.mae.apple.com".
My Mac has 128MB of RAM but the NIH Image About Box shows only 2500K free. Why is that?
You need to allocate more memory to NIH Image. Click (once) on the NIH Image icon (a microscope), select the Finder's Get Info command, and increase "Preferred size".
Why does the desktop change color when I run NIH Image?
NIH Image uses all but two of the 256 available screen colors when the monitor is set to 256 colors. The two "colors" that Image never changes are white (0) and black (255). Objects on the screen that are not black and white are likely to change color when NIH Image is being
used. You can avoid this problem by selecting "Desktop Friendly" in Preferences, but this reduces the number of grays displayed to 16. If your hardware supports it, you can also avoid this problem by switching the monitor to "thousands" or "millions" of colors.
Why does text look ragged when I print an image on a laser printer?
NIH Image treats text as if it were part of the bitmapped image. To create
high quality text for laser printer output and slide makers you need to
export the image to a multi-layer, object-oriented drawing program, such as ClarisDraw or PowerPoint.
In NIH Image, white is 0 and black is 255, which is the opposite of what I'm used to. How can I change this?
Check "Invert Pixel Values" in Preferences. This sets up an inverting density
calibration function, causing pixels values displayed in the Info and Results windows to be inverted.
Why does the Paste command sometimes get dimmed out?
Images copied to the clipboard are stored in the Clipboard buffer. In
some situations, such as filtering, NIH Image has to use the Clipboard buffer for
internal operations. When this is happens, the Paste command gets dimmed out.
You can't normally combine two images that have different LUTs, but if you check "Keep LUT" when you open the second image (which must be stored as a
PICT file) its pixel values will be remapped to conform to the LUT of the first
image. You will then be able to successfully Copy and Paste, since both images
have the same LUT.
Save the stack in PICS format and open it in Apple's MoviePlayer program. MoviePlayer will automatically convert the PICS file into a QuickTime movie.
There are a number of documents available explaning anything from portions
of the theoretical principles of densitomtry, to step by step help in using
the gel analysis macros. Those interested in densitometry should strive to
understand NIH Image's Calibrate command and why it is used.
For explanation regarding basic underlying principles of densitometry read
the section of
NIH Image Engineering on densitometry.
For basic step by step explanation on the gel macros, the
Techniques section of the NIH Image Manual should be read.
And finally, for a longer and more thorough step by step explanation as to how to
use the gel macros, refer to the
Using Image for Densitometric Analysis of 1-D Gels manual.
How should I cite NIH Image
Published research assisted by NIH Image should use a statement similar to the following in the materials and methods section "... analysis performed on a Macintosh Is there an NIH Image Home Page?
The NIH Image home page provides on-line documentation, links to download the software, tutorials, links to other image processing software, an archive to search for answers to questions and more. The NIH Image home page is located at:
How do I download NIH Image using a Web browser?
The latest version of NIH Image, documentation, source code,
macros and more can be downloaded by going to NIH Image Home Page and following the "Download" link.
How do I download the latest version of NIH Image via FTP?
The latest version of NIH Image, documentation, source code,
macros and more can be found on the anonymous ftp server
zippy.nimh.nih.gov. Choose the directory directory /pub/nih-image. The best way to download the program is to use the user-friendly
Macintosh FTP client
Fetch..
gopher://gopher.soils.umn.edu
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