Creating a Montage

See also Stitching for details on stitching montage images.

Montage

In the current version of Fusion, Montage can be added to a Time Series or a Z-stack Protocol.

This ensures that images are acquired so that they overlap slightly, allowing a montage of the image to be created from a series of smaller images. This can be useful for capturing high resolution images of samples that are larger than the field of view.

There are two ways to define a Montage - Fields and Edge.

Defining by Fields

In this mode, the size of the montage is defined by the number of fields. A field corresponds to the size of the image seen by the camera and magnification being used.

Width/Height - Define the size of the montage as the number of overlapping fields.

Overlap - How much each will overlap its neighbours. Default = 15%

Relative Montage Position - The position of the montage relative to the current position. For example, when going Live, the sample can be seen and the current location will be taken as the centre of the montage in the screen above.

Defining by Edge

In this mode, the size of the montage is defined by adding two or more fields to the list, similar to the operation of MultiField.

Navigate using the hardware or software joystick to the edge of the sample and click the + button, shown below, to add two or more fields.

Montage Order - this is simply to show the order in which the images are acquired.

Note - the image axes in Fusion and Imaris originate from the lower left corner. As a result, when opened in other software, the montage order may be different to that shown here. See also Image Tools for a description of this.

Images acquired using Montage can be stitched after acquisition using TeraStitcher.

Alternatively, stitching can also be done in a variety of 3rd party software - for example, XUVTools and FIJI's Grid/Collection stitching plugin. Please refer to those software packages for instructions on how to combine the images into a complete montage.