Using ImageTool

Imagetool Imagetool

Inspired by Image Tool for Igor Pro written by the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ImageTool is a simple tool for interactively exploring images.

Features include:

  • Zooming and panning

  • Extremely fast and smooth data exploration

  • Real-time binning across multiple dimensions

  • Multiple cursors!

  • Easy and intuitive plot size adjustment with splitters

  • Advanced colormap control

ImageTool can be used to display image-like xarray.DataArrays ranging from 2 to 4 dimensions. If a coordinate of the input data happens to be non-uniform, it will automatically be converted to an index array so that the data can be displayed.

There are two main ways to invoke the ImageTool. First is to call the itool convenience function, which will create a new ImageTool instance and handle the event loop execution:

import erlab.interactive as eri
eri.itool(data)

Another way is to use the qshow accessor:

data.qshow()

Tips

  • If you don’t know what a button does, many buttons have tooltips that will appear when you hover over them.

  • Right-clicking on each plot will bring up a context menu with various options. One useful option is Copy selection code that copies the selection code which can be quickly pasted to a Python script or Jupyter notebook to reproduce the sliced data. You can also save the data corresponding to each slice as a HDF5 file.

  • ImageTool is also very extensible. At our home lab, we use a modified version of ImageTool to plot data as it is being collected in real-time!

Keyboard shortcuts

Hints for most keyboard shortcuts are displayed in the menu bar. Here, some shortcuts that are not found in the menu bar are listed. Mac users must replace Ctrl with ⌘ and Alt with ⌥.

Shortcut

Description

LMB Drag

Pan around

RMB Drag

Zoom and scale

Ctrl+LMB Drag

Move current cursor around

Ctrl+Alt+LMB Drag

Move all cursors around

Alt while dragging a cursor line

Make all cursor lines move together