PRIISM

Overview

Priism is a graphical interface to a collection of applications for the analysis and visualization of multidimensional data with a focus on data from 3D optical microscopy and electron tomography.

Priism consists of three parts: the graphical interface for starting applications; the graphics windows in which images of data are displayed; and the separate applications that operate on those windows or on disk files. For more information on the applications, consult the list of applications by category or by name.

Many parts of Priism can be customized. The default attributes for the image windows can be changed by selecting Preferences from the File menu. The applications that appear in the Priism and image window menu bar can also be customized: look at the files CONFIG/IVE_NEW_FUNC_LIST and CONFIG/MON_NEW_FUNC_LIST if you want to add or remove applications.

Programming interfaces in C and FORTRAN are provided with Priism to allow you to write applications that extend Priism's capabilities.

Topics

Overview | Interface | Color tables | Programming

Related Priism Topics

Applications by category | Applications by name | Installation | IVE 4 FAQ | Recent changes | Known problems | Reporting problems | Priism download site

User Interface

The Priism interface consists of a menu bar from which you can select an application to run. From the Help menu of the menu bar you can look up the online help for an application in the menus. The File menu has an option to close Priism and any open applications.

At the end of the menu bar are two buttons that will affect any open image windows. -Section+ will cause all open display window to display either the previous (if you click on the minus end of the button) or the next (if you click on the plus end of the button) two-dimensional section of data. The -Zoom+ button works similarly, but it changes the magnification at which data is displayed in all the open display windows.

Topics

Overview | Interface | Color tables | Programming

Color Tables

The "Change lookup table" entry in Priism's Color menu allows you to change the palette of colors used when displaying images in pseudocolor. Any change will affect all image windows.

The "Change lookup table" menu has a set of predefined color tables and a "Load..." option for loading your own tables. The predefined color tables are set by the CONFIG/LUT.def file in the Priism directory. The standard tables are:

Standard Grey

The colors range from black for the lowest scaled image values through increasingly bright shades of grey for larger scaled values. This is the palette Priism will use when it starts.

Inverse Grey

The colors range from white for the lowest scaled image values through successively dimmer shades of grey for larger scaled image values.

Spectrum

As the scaled image values increase, the colors span the gamut starting with black followed by shades of blue, cyan, green, yellow, and red.

Rainbow

The lowest and highest scaled values appear in the same color, purple. For intermediate scaled values, the colors range from shades of blue, to green, to red.

The "Load..." option in the "Change lookup table" menu will open a dialog for selecting a color table, viewing the gamut of colors, and applying the color table to Priism's image windows. To select the color table, either enter its file name directly in the text field at the top of the dialog or press the "File" button and use the file selection dialog that appears to choose the file. Priism can handle two types of color table formats:

The ASCII format MayaVi uses

A header line as LOOKUP_TABLE followed by white space followed by the table name with no embedded white space followed by the number of table entries. The table entries appear in order with one entry per line. Each entry has red, green, blue, and alpha components (in that order), and each component is a floating point value between zero and one.

The binary PAL format

The file has 768 bytes of data representing a 256 entry color table. The first 256 bytes hold the red components, the second 256 bytes hold the green components, and the final 256 bytes hold the blue components.

If you have selected a color table that Priism understands, Priism will display the gamut of colors immediately below the "File" field. The toggle buttons below the gamut control possible transformations that Priism can apply to the color table. The toggle buttons are:

skip

If the color table has more colors than Priism can use, turning on this toggle button will cause Priism to skip roughly evenly spaced colors throughout the gamut. The skip, truncate, and shift transformations are mutually exclusive.

truncate

If the color table has more colors than Priism can use, turning on this toggle button will cause Priism to ignore the colors at the end of the table. The skip, truncate, and shift transformations are mutually exclusive.

shift

If the color table has more colors than Priism can use, turning on this toggle button will cause Priism to ignore colors at the beginning of the table. The skip, truncate, and shift transformations are mutually exclusive.

reverse

Reverses the order of the color table entries. Reversing the order occurs before the skip, truncate, or shift transformations.

Pressing the "Apply" button at the bottom of the dialog causes Priism to use the selected color table for all image windows. Pressing the "Close" button at the bottom of the dialog closes the dialog.

Topics

Overview | Interface | Color tables | Programming

Programming Interfaces

The Priism programming interface has five parts:

IM Library

Provides functions for manipulating Priism data files.

IW Library

Builds on the IM library to provide functions for manipulating graphics windows and the data they contain.

WM Library

Is a toolkit for building menus and dialogs. If you use this library, you will also need to link with the IW library.

IP Framework

Provides a skeleton application for image processing (especially 2D). You customize it by writing callback routines.

IOMENU Utility

Facilitates writing a thin graphical interface for launching a command-line application.

See the EXAMPLE directory for sample applications which use the Priism programming interface.

Topics

Overview | Interface | Color tables | Programming