12 bit grayscale imgae

[Hee-Joon Kim]

I got 2D pixel (1024 x 1024) data having a 12 bit resolution.
It's just a contrast information(no color information).
How can I make a BMP image file from those data ?

Thanks in advance.

H.J. Kim

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> I got 2D pixel (1024 x 1024) data having a 12 bit resolution.
> It's just a contrast information(no color information).
> How can I make a BMP image file from those data ?
>

A BMP file can save your image with 16 bits of information per
pixel, which will preserve all of your data. It will not be
obvious from the BMP that these are all intensity values. In
fact, it will not be possible to display all 4096 intensities
at once on the typical monitor using only shades of one color.

Your options are to scale or zoom the data to a 256 intensity
display. Looking at the entire image, you will lose resolution,
but if you zoom in on a particular intensity range, and clip the
others, you can see all of the detail in your image, just not all
at once. You can do all of th
is with the intensity graph.
Another approach is to false-color your image in order to
spread it over more than one color band, and to highlight
certain intensities ranges. You can do this when originally
saving the BMP, or do it just when displaying the data.
The intensity graph uses a color palette to map intensities to
colors, and can only display 256 distinct colors at once; so
it won't be able to do this in one step. The picture control
can display true-color bitmaps. If you do some pixel-by-pixel
color computations to map your intensities to a sequence of color
ranges, then you can display them using the picture control.

I'm may be jumping ahead here. Assuming all you want to do is to
save the image, you may want to consider a TIFF instead of a
BMP. TIFF allows for 12-bit and higher intensity images. The
IMAQ Vision add-on toolkit has some support for TIFFs, but there
is none built into LV.

Greg McKaskle