jfyan

starting from a microscope photography, i need to determine the number of objects shown within any given area in the picture (in this case blood vessels). selecting two-color picture, the objects to be counted are clearly distinguishable. is there a way of using photoshop to obtain the number of objects or, at least, a ratio between the object color and the background color????

MsOz

I doubt it. Photoshop pushes pixels and colors them. That's all. It does not do computational mathematics, which is what you appear to be needing. I doubt a software application exists that can determine the number of objects represented in an image. You would need many lines of code, and extremely large supercomputer, and a darn good spectrum analyzer connected to both.
About the closest you will get to what you are looking for is creating a color palette of all the hues (and shades) used in an image, but Photoshop cannot tell you how many pixels in an image are used as a numerical answer, although the Histogram can show them to you in luminousity levels. But, in the end, you will still have to have a human compare/contrast and count the objects in the image.

Sark

If the image is two colour, with clear space between the objects to be counted, you could in theory trace the image to convert it to a vector.
Seperated and ungrouped each solid colour element would be an object. Apps like Illustrator or CorelDraw can then list the number of objects present.

I personally would not recommend this method for critical medical research purposes but, it is theoretically possible if absolute accuracy was not a priority.

Sark

Welles

Hi bardamu,

Welcome to the forum!

I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that there is a Feature Measurement component of the Fovea Pro set of Photoshop plugins for scientific analysis. That would do exactly what you want. The bad news is that Fovea Pro costs $800. Highly technical and specialized programs are costly.

http://www.reindeergraphics.com/foveapro/measure.shtml

There's a link on this page to the index for Fovea Pro if you want to look at all the tools.

Cheers! (0r maybe not)

P.S. You can request a time-limited demo from info@reindeergraphics.com

jfyan

8))
Thanx a lot Welles that was good news!!!

Welles

[righton] Great! Good luck with your research.

ladyfinger007

Welcome to PSG!
An alternate (and free!) method: if the two elements colors are clearly different (like your message suggests), select the dots with the magic wand, make sure that "contiguous" is selected in the option bar. Now go to image>histogram, and you will see the number of pixels selected. (You then need to do a "select all", then go to the histogram to know the total number of pixels, then calculate the percentage of covered area)

But Reindeer graphics Fovea Pro is THE plug-in suite for analysis purposes!