Supported File Formats

Fusion writes data to the hard drive as IMS files and txt files (for metadata) as it acquires. See the File Management section for more details.

IMS

The IMS file format is based on Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5), which is designed to work with huge multidimensional data and is optimized to allow extremely fast visualization of huge volume data. To facilitate this, the format stores not only the original image data but also lower resolution versions of the original data. This allows the visualization software to load the resolutions which match those of the screen. Also, for the purpose of fast rendering, the Imaris File Format stores the image data in contiguous 3D chunks (or blocks), which enables the software to load only the data that is in the field of view. The multiresolution structure and the chunk-wise storage layout are the cornerstones of this high performance IMS file format for big datasets.  The IMS file format has been enabling Imaris users to work with huge data sets since 2006 and now Fusion is utilising this superior form of file format.

Over the last nine years Bitplane has continuously improved IMS to ensure optimum performance and in 2015 has moved to Open Source so that the image analysis and microscopy community can fully benefit from its capabilities. With the advantage of light sheet microscopy and large chip sCMOS/EMCCD cameras, microscopists frequently generate several hundreds of gigabytes of 3D data per experiment. By making IMS Open Source we aim to work with the microscopy community to solve one of the most challenging bottlenecks of the early 21st century.

- See more at: http://www.bitplane.com/news/bitplane-makes-the-ims-file-format-open-source-130815#sthash.VuaNfcj1.dpuf

TIFF

TIFF stands for "Tagged Image File Format" and is a standard in the printing and publishing industry. TIFF files are significantly larger than their JPEG counterparts, and can be either uncompressed or compressed using lossless compression. Unlike JPEG, TIFF files can have a bit depth of either 16-bits per channel or 8-bits per channel, and multiple layered images can be stored in a single TIFF file.

TIFF files are an excellent option for archiving intermediate files which you may edit later, since it introduces no compression artifacts. Many cameras have an option to create images as TIFF files, but these can consume excessive space compared to the same JPEG file. If your camera supports the RAW file format this is a superior alternative, since these are significantly smaller and can retain even more information about your image.

sourced from http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/imagetypes.htm