Colour merge

Purpose

This plugin allows you to merge two grayscale stacks into a single RGB stack. It is useful e.g. to merge a brightfield with the corresponding fluorescence image, or two different dye images of the same series.

Documentation

Adapted from the MBF ImageJ manual:

The Plugins › Color functions › Color Merge function gives the user the option of using the Difference arithmetic processing on the image stacks you select. This is not strictly a merge (when cyan and magenta merge they produce white, not yellow) but facilitates visualization of the separate channels (See

Demandolx D., Davoust J., “Multicolour analysis and local image correlation in confocal microscopy”, Journal of microscopy 185: 21-36 . . You can perform a true merge if you turn off the “Difference” option.

Run the plugin and select the two images or stacks to be merged. It can be 8-bit, 16-bit, RGB… Select the desired colors from the drop-down options. uses the LUT that the image currently has (this is often the desired LUT). The “Difference” option performs a “difference” arithmetic operation rather than a “addition”. If the “Pre-sub 2 from 1” option is checked the second image is subtracted from the first prior to merging.