ImageJ : Cross-platform Image Processing and Enhancing Software

ImageJ is a powerful image processing and enhancing software that works across all the popular platforms. It is designed using Java programming language. As such you can basically run it on all platforms that have JRE (Java Runtimes Environment) available for them. You don’t even have to install JRE on your computer because it offers portable packages containing JRE files inside.

ImageJ does not have a large GUI and opens up in form of just a toolbar. It reminds of the older versions of GIMP that also featured just a toolbar until you created a new image file or open an image file. The images are opened in a separate detached window. For working on the images, you can select various tools from the toolbar or right-click on the image file.

ImageJ

ImageJ supports all the major image file formats like BMP, GIF, TIFF, and JPEG. In order to play with the various tools and get a feel of the software, ImageJ comes with sample images which include all types of image files and image sequences. You can also download these sample images separately from their website.

ImageJ offers many different tools such as selection tools, line drawing, geometric shapes, cropping, duplicating, or rotating the image. You can also add text and annotate the images. There are blurring and smoothing tools too.

ImageJ supports macros using which you can repeat your actions such as watermarking. For this, you can right-click on the image and choose “recorder” options for recording your actions. All recorded macros can be used to carry out a sequence of actions in the same order – this may not only save your time, but can also make your actions very accurate.

In addition, you can also have access to batch processing of multiple images. This is really great if you have to apply the same image operations on hundreds of images at the same time.

You can download ImageJ from https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/index.html.