What are some advantages of digital photomicrography?

Question

Okay, I know advantages are that it allows scientists to keep a permanent record of a speciment for reference, and further research.

Are there any disavantages of using a digital photomicrography?

This is a question in my lab report.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

I published my first totally digital paper on confocal scanning laser microscopy of plant tissues in Biotechnic & Biochemistry in 1996 and never looked back until I retired a few years ago.  For the first 30 years of my professional career as a transmission electron microscopist and light microscopist  I was a slave to the darkroom to get photographs printed just right so that their backgrounds would match and their contrast was correct for publications.  Putting labels on the images for publication also was a pain with Lettraset and other rub on letters, or, in the very old days, using India ink with special stencils.

Also, working in the darkroom with all those chemicals was difficult and storage of negatives was a total pain.  For example, our early electron micrographs were on glass plates because people thought glass plates provided better detail than film.  The plates took up space and were heavy to move around. Not only that, they could break.  What a relief when Dupont and Kodak came out with films that surpassed glass plates in quality.

Once our lab moved to digitized images and used earler versions of Photoshop and eventually GIMP, it was much easier to store images and manipulate their properties such as gamma.  Labeling for publishing was much easier.

There are two drawbacks to digitized images.  The first is that they are easy to modify if someone wanted to fudge their data.  This seems to be more common today as I read the news about lawsuits at major universities.  The second is that unless a scale is printed on the image when it is recorded, as the image is adjusted in magnification the user might not know what the actual magnification of the printed image is.  I.e., how would one know to put the correct scale on the image.

In the old days with actual photographs on film, you knew what magnification the image was recorded on film.  E.g., on the light microscope I used, the oil immersion objective and photo ocular magnified the image 800x on 35 mm film in the photomicrography unit that I had.  This was determined both mathematically and by photographing a stage micrometer, a must for any serious laboratory doing light microscopy.

http://www.2spi.com/catalog/ltmic/stage-...

When I magnified the image 3x in the darkroom, that gave a final magnification of 2400x, which is just right for publication of an oil immersion image with light microscopy.  The 10 micrometer scale on the image would then be 24 mm.  For most images a 5 micrometer line would be 12 mm long and fit on the image better.  With digital photography one must really pay attention to how the image is manipulated to know the actual magnification of the final image.