Dear all,

maybe you can help me with the following problem:
Until now I used a drawing tube to illustrate scientific publications, but now as I left the university I do not longer have this oppertunity.

I have a Tucsen 5.0MP digital microscope camera and stacked the images with picolay or combine zp. After this I tried to draw over this images in incscape but i worked not so well.

My Question: Is there a way to import the live view of the camera into inkscape '(or a other software) an to draw over this live view, so I can change focus, brightness an so on?

I am thankfull for any suggestion!

Thanks a lot, Johannes

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I'm not sure what you mean by "live view". Inkscape doesn't have any kind of support for animation or video. You could import a photo, or other raster formatted image, and then draw over it. But I don't know how to get what the camera sees, into Inkscape, except after the photo has been taken.

Someone who is more familiar with photography may have some alternative ideas.

--J--S-- wrote:Is there a way to import the live view of the camera into inkscape '(or a other software) an to draw over this live view, so I can change focus, brightness an so on?

No, Inkscape does not have such a feature to embed a live video feed in something like a 'render frame' (don't know about other apps which would allow to create vector overlays based on such a video feed).

A feature you might make use of in Inkscape: when importing a bitmap image (aka raster graphics file) into an Inkscape document (e.g. via 'File > Import…') you have to choose whether to embed or link the imported image. If you choose 'Link', the image in the SVG document will be referenced by a link to the external bitmap image. Whenever the external image changes on disk, Inkscape will reload it. Thus you could resave a snapshot from your camera using the same file name and location, while having the Inkscape document open, and let Inkscape reload the linked image to test different settings for focus, brightness etc.

Not being well versed in live view for microscopes, but recently finishing Uni, I thought I would list the pieces of software that I thought could match / help / if you asked people involved would be more knowledgeable about requirements/ solutions:

http://gwyddion.net/ Mostly deals with AFM / scanning force microscopes
http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/ You should have heard of it, image processing for microscope images
Also with plugins like these: http://loci.wisc.edu/bio-formats/imagej you should at least be able to navigate around your image files (hopefully)...

http://www.picolay.de/ itself, although I suspect you already know about that...

Not sure if that will help at all, but my best bet would be to ask on the imagej mailing list / search there help / archives.

Thanks to everybody!

I am afraid I have try other software solutions...

thanks, happyne year!