Image Visualizations

The IDL Visualize Perspective makes it easy to immediately view image data. For images, you skip the step of opening the data files to display the variables — just double-click an image in the Project Explorer or use File → Open File and select the image file to immediately display the image in an iTool window.

Tip
If you do not want to automatically visualize images, you can change a preference setting. See Image Open Preference for instructions.

Image Example

The easiest example of the Visualize Perspective workflow is opening an image file. Use the following steps to open an image and use the iImage tool to analyze and manipulate the data.

Note
This example assumes the default action definitions. Your results may be different if you have added new actions or changed the order of actions. To return all Tool Palette actions to their system default state, see Resetting the Default Actions.

Make sure you are viewing the IDL Visualize Perspective. (Click the Visualize button (

) in the upper right of the Workbench.)

In IDL, select File → Open File.

Navigate to the examples\data directory of your IDL installation.

Select the file glowing_gas.jpg.

The image opens in an iImage window:

Now you can analyze and manipulate the image using all the functionality of iImage. For more information, see Working with Images.

The variable for the image now displays in the Variables View in IDL. When you close the iImage window, the image variable is still available during the current session. You can click on and drag the variable to the tool to visualize it again.

Manipulating the Image

Once you have visualized an image, you can perform many different kinds of operations on it, including:

Overplotting another visualization (see Surface and Contour Example and Plot With Overplot Example, and Alternative Methods for Overplotting (Windows Only))

Using the Image Panel to view and modify regions of interest, pixel value, location, and scale, edit the palette, etc. (see Using the Image Panel)

Modifying properties such as adding colorbars, axes, resampling, filtering, contouring, and surfacing (see Image Properties)

Manipulating the image by rotating, scaling, flipping, inverting, zooming, adding annotations, etc. (see Manipulating the Image Display)

Changing iImage operations such as scaling, cropping, or viewing statistics or a histogram (see iImage Tool Operations)

Using the iTools Procedural Interface to add a variety of annotations.

For more information, please refer to Working with Images and Manipulating the Display in the iTools User Guide.