Tiles Blending is an image postprocessing function, which takes any tiled images as input. There is no calibration or special light path information needed, and it works for fluorescence, reflected light, and transmitted light images. It reduces or compensates shading artefacts, which are often visible at tile borders. It calculates a shading model for each tile and uses it to correct the shading. The tiles in the input image must have a notable overlap typically in the range of 5%, 10% or 15% (larger overlaps usually lead to better blending results) and must have been stitched without Fuse Tiles beforehand, see Stitching. Due to the missing overlap region of already fused images they cannot be processed and you will see an error message.

Parameter

Description

Quality

Controls the computational effort which is spent to compensate shading artefacts of tiled images. You have the following options:

  • Normal
  • High
  • Highest

Normal is the default and sufficient in most cases. For input images with pronounced shading artefacts and small overlaps, more computation effort can be selected with the High or Highest option.

Use Averaging

Activated: The blending information of all tiles is averaged and the same correction is applied to all tiles. This can be useful for tiled images with very low signal to noise ratio.

Deactivated: The blending between neighboring tiles is treated individually. This is the default and usually yields the best results.

Extended Blending

Only visible if Show All is activated.

Activated: Performs an additional spline-based correction to the pixels inside the overlap regions. This is the default setting.

Changing the setting is only needed in rare cases, for example when the blending result seems to overcompensate shading artefacts. In such cases, deactivate Extended Blending or Overlapping Region Blending.

Overlapping Region Blending

Only visible if Show All is activated.

Activated: Performs an additional linear blending only for the overlapping tile regions, which can correct residual blending errors that were not corrected by the blending function. This is the default setting.

Changing the setting is only needed in rare cases, for example when the blending result seems to overcompensate shading artefacts. In such cases, deactivate Extended Blending or Overlapping Region Blending.

Correction Factor Limit

Only visible if Show All is activated.

Defines an upper threshold for how strong the shading correction effect is applied. For each pixel a correction factor is calculated. For example, a value of 0.3 means the correction cannot deviate more than 30% from the original value. Larger values mean that stronger compensation is allowed, smaller values mean that the compensation is reduced.