Frequently Asked Questions

XuvTools can read many input formats: BioRad PIC, TIFF, Metamorph STK (uncompressed and LZW compressed), Fluoview TIFF, Carl Zeiss LSM 5, PSIA TIFF, Nanoscope II/III, JPEG, PNG, BMP, IBW, OME and RAW.

You need as much RAM as you can get! From 8 to 16 GB are ok, 32 GB are good, 128 GB are better! You need roughly twice as much RAM as your dataset is large, i.e. a 6 GB LSM stitching requires 12 GB of RAM!

Yes, neighbouring images should have 5% to 10% overlap for automatic stitching. For manual stitching, you do not need overlap. Very important: in the overlapping region, there needs to be some structure (neuron, cells, beads, whatever). No matter what, any structure is good! Plain background is useless!

You do not have to stick to a grid when imaging. Feel free to use the joystick, and follow your structure with the table. But remember to keep 5% - 10% overlap between neighbouring image stacks!

Always use zoom=1.0 (no zoom), else you can get border artifacts (barrel distortions or similar) that make stitching almost impossible!

Yes, multiple channels are supported. Actually, multiple channels are good! The more channels you have, the more likely you will get good stitching results.

Brightfield is not likely to help for the stitching, since brightfield has a plane of focus, which is a fundamental difference to confocal stacks.

All bit depths are supported by XuvTools. You can use 8, 12, or 16 bit (or more if you have!). A higher bit depth is good, and can help improve stitching quality.

No! You can do stacks with different objectives and different binnings if you like. I.e. you can use a 10x objective for an overview, and then use a 63x objective to image details inside your overview! XuvTools will scale all stacks to the finest resolution available.