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Openlab is a camera capture software for Apple Macs. I don't recommend learning to use Openlab if you are a new user because development of the software stopped in 2010. The software still works on Macs running OSX up to and including version 10.6.8 but not newer versions so if a computer running Openlab is replaced or if the version of OSX is upgraded then Openlab will stop working. In that situation you would then need to learn how to use another capture software. Any data you have in Openlab format can still be opened and converted into other formats using Fiji and other software. This is intended as a quick guide to getting started in Openlab. More information can be found in the Openlab user guide.

Make sure the camera is switched on before opening Openlab, then click the Openlab icon in the dock.

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Openlab Icon

 

 



Openlab user interface

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The Openlab interface consists of a main menu, a document window and several free-floating palettes. The adjacent image shows the menu and document window. The document window has a bar on the left with tools that you can use to get a live preview (the display icon), capture images (the camera icon), digitally zoom on images, colourise them, etc. Initially the document window will be empty but the live preview and captured images will appear in here. There should be a few free-floating palettes. The most important ones are the Video Controls and Layers palettes. If they aren't on the screen they might have been closed or minimised to icons at the bottom of the screen. You can open them again by going to Windows in the main menu and selecting Palettes. All the available palettes will appear in a drop-down list but you only need the ones I've mentioned.

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Openlab Document Window

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I would strongly recommend saving data in Openlab's native LIFF format initially so all image metadata is retained and no image data is lost. Openlab LIFF files (not to be confused with Leica's LIF confocal file format) are compatible with the Bioformats Importer so you should be able to open them in Fiji provided all the images in the file are at the same depth. You can also save in other formats like TIFF but the image metadata will not be retained so you will have to make a note of the image calibration. TIFF for Publication is a special format that saves the data at a depth of RGB colour regardless of what it was captured at. This is so images captured at unusual depths like 12-bit render correctly in basic image viewers like Preview and Windows Photo Viewer as well as in PowerPoint. TIFF for Publication images are for presentation only and should not be used for quantification.

'Save As Multiple...' saves layers separately rather than as a single layered file. You might find this useful if you want to save images as TIFFs to further process in photo editing software because Photoshop and GIMP don't support layers in the same way as scientific processing software. You must to select the layers you want to save and you must define a Naming scheme for the images (e.g. by telling Openlab to sequentially number them).

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