Pictures, data retrieval, webcam

General purpose image viewing

multi purpose viewer and thumbnail sorting, can take nice screen shots too, Irfan-view http://www.irfanview.com/ nice tool for “dewarping” pictures, meaning making bend pages and similar things look like scans http://www.photoscanner.eu/

Printing:

Cool online tool for changing RGB into CMYK (for printing) https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/

scientific picture treatment:

imagej is in principle a platform independent image tool with full control over each step. Beside tresholding and the usual things there are modules for particle analysis, 3d cuts and so much more. It also has a plugin interface. This has led over many years to a huge database of plugins for pretty much any task one could imagine. There are three mayor versions of imagej.

• The “vanilla” version that contains the program and can be extended. https://imagej.net/ij/
• Fiji (standing for Fiji is just imagej) … in which most of the plugins are already loaded https://fiji.sc
• Micromanager that like Fiji contains many plugins and was specially designed for controlling microscopes and image recording. https://micro-manager.org

lispix http://www.nist.gov/lispix/

Python and Matlab have extensive modules for Picture treatment especially for biological imaging and including particle tracking and separating modules, 3d tools and more is the package BioImageXD http://www.bioimagexd.net/

photo treatment:

gimp for serious treatment in the style of photoshop. It has a rather steep learning curve so. http://www.gimp.org/

only recently there is a powerfull new image program available. Lightzone. It works non destructive until the picture is saved and used to be  expensive. Now it is free and quite fast to achieve nice images. http://lightzoneproject.org/

for working with raw images there are several nice tools:

raw therapy  is a very powerful image tool and my current go to. It has sooo many tools, and I highly recommend to start with a tutorial and then focus on the essential tools. It is amazing what capability they offer fro free here. http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Photivo http://photivo.org/

UFRaw:http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Install.html

for linus only there is the raw editor http://www.darktable.org/

Animated Gifs

Programs for combining different pictures to animated gif: (this is what you want to do in a presentation, gif always work and do not hang like movies) http://www.onyxbits.de/giftedmotion (java, without installation)

http://www.benetonsoftware.com/Beneton_Movie_GIF.php

http://www.polygonsoft.com/product_info.php?cPath=26&products_id=38 (german) Really good program for making manuals or time/event regulated screenshots http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

Interesting movie recording tool.

https://mathewsachin.github.io/Captura/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

really nice programs for digitizing data

I recently stumbled over this web tool that can be used online or be downloaded for many platforms. It works like a charm. I highly recommend to listen to the instructions  under help for how to start using it. https://apps.automeris.io/wpd/

the oldest in this list but works ok http://www.unige.ch/sciences/chifi/cpb/windig.html

http://www.frantz.fi/software/g3data.php

This one is supposed to be automatic, haven’t tried Engauge Digitizer http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/index.php?c=2

This java based plot digitizer is supposed to be automatic but haven’t tried it yet http://sourceforge.net/projects/plotdigitizer/ (needs this extra program for automatic retrieval: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/)

this little tool that is supposed to work with different colors during the data retrieval http://www.sgrillo.net/graphdata/

CSV tools

It happened quite often that ascii files you retrieve are strangely separated. this CSVeditor has helped me often to clean up data http://csved.sjfrancke.nl/

data mining program (for finding connections in curves)  http://rapid-i.com/content/blogcategory/10/69/lang,en/

video tools

virtual dub has a large subset of plugins that can do pretty much everything you will ever need. I like the extraction algorithm to make a set of jpg out of whatever video format http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/

audio tools

Tool for recording and mixing sound: https://ardour.org Manual for Ardour:https://manual.ardour.org/toc/ Usefull plugin manager for Ardour: https://calf-studio-gear.org Sampler tool for Ardour:https://samplv1.sourceforge.io Free plugins for Ardour:https://samplesfrommars.com/products/free-808-from-mars

One for the near standard tools is Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org

webcam software

A really nice tool for working with webcams is a version of ImageJ called MicroManager. Developed for control of microscopes it combines the handling of recording software with image treatment. https://micro-manager.org

small minimalistic software with scaling of the screen and many settings. Camera settings must be changed in the native camera software Booruwebcam free for non commercial use   http://www.booru.net/projects.html

webcam software that shows pictures and can insert scales originally programmed for CNC called CentreCam free only for evaluation purposes  http://www.miketreth.mistral.co.uk/centrecam.htm

webcam software with settings, not sure how good yet but looks like usefull   http://www.freewarefiles.com/RGS-AvaCam_program_23445.html

Powerfull suite to stream data https://obsproject.com/de/download

Turn an raspberry pi with camera into a remote observation studio https://raspberry-valley.azurewebsites.net/MotionEye-OS/