Scaling of TIFFs from JEOL SPMs

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Has anyone written a snippet to get the proper XYZ scaling for SPM image files (TIFF format) produced by JEOL SPMs? I couldn't find any mention of it on the exchange or the Igor mailing list. I thought it might be worth a query here.

The JEOL SPM software saves the image data as a TIFF. Igor can import the TIFF fine, but ignores all of the scaling information. I assume that the scaling information exists as tags somewhere in the TIFF files, but I'm not sure how to get it.

Specifics:
Instrument: JEOL JSTM-4500XT (probably late 90's/early 2000's vintage)
Igor version 6, Mac OS 10.5.4

Thanks in advance.

Cheers.

Ian T. Clark
Post Doctoral Researcher
Toyota Technological Institute,
Surface Science Laboratory
Hello Ian,

You can read all TIFF tags using the /RAT flag.

A.G.
WaveMetrics, Inc.

August 20, 2008 at 08:48 am - Permalink

Thanks AG. Not sure how I missed that in the help files.

Unfortunately it appears that JEOL doesn't want to give up its secrets that easily.

ImageLoad/RAT/T=tiff "path to my STM image file" results in two warnings [Unsupported TIFF entry (tag=0 type=0 length=0 val=0)] in the history and the tags that do show up in T_Tags are either not useful or not intelligible.

The JEOL image analysis software knows what the correct x, y and z scaling is (along with all sorts of other, largely unnecessary tidbits) so I'm sure the information is in there somewhere, but - perhaps not unexpectedly - they don't make it easy to find. Why they would use a perfectly good, standard file specification if they intended to ignore its rules and make the files readable only by their proprietary software is beyond me but maybe that's why I'm not a JEOL exec.

Thanks again.

Ian

August 21, 2008 at 02:38 am - Permalink

Ian,

If you want me to look into this just send me (support) a sample file.


AG
WaveMetrics, Inc.

August 25, 2008 at 12:29 pm - Permalink