Task One and Task Two
As I said in my previous blog post, on Tuesday I was given three tasks to do. Task one and task two I finished on Tuesday. A reminder of the tasks:
1. Help Dr. Zega retrieve data from the FIB Computer for his paper.
2. Help Dr. Wallace clean up the image for the hall decoration.
Starting with task one, I was instructed to find the data set and export them to Dr. Zega whether that be via Flash drive or Google Drive. Before exporting the images, however, I was given more instructions to help Dr. Zega. For one, he would have liked if I could have associated certain elements found in the sample with certain colors in the images. For example, Titanium to show up as red and Potassium to show up as magenta. Each element was already preassigned a color so we had to figure out how to change those to the colors Dr. Zega would have liked. The way to do this was quite tedious. The TEAM software has a pie chart of the different elements on the left side of the screen. Each section of the pie chart is already colored the preassigned color. In order the change the color, we figured out that we must click on the LETTERS of the element on the pie chart.
The second issue with task one was that clicking anywhere on the sample image pulled focus to that area. Clicking elsewhere would move the focus, but it would never get rid of the focus. Click and Dragging on the image would focus around an area. Clicking and Dragging off the screen seemed to work, however, it would still focus on the point where the mouse dragged off the screen. The solution to this was also tedious to find. I had to HOVER over the focus and wait until it turned red, and after that clicking the point would delete it off the image.
The next issue we still have not found the solution to. On every image, there is a scale bar. Dr. Zega would have liked to remove this scale bar so he could place his own scale bar anywhere of his choosing. In order to fix this issue, we emailed an EDAX service helper by the name of Shawn Wallace (no, he is not related to my adviser, Dr. Paul Wallace). Up till today, we have not received an email on the solution to this issue.
The last issue dealing with this task was the exporting of the files. The TEAM Software has multiple ways of exporting files. The most simple form of exporting out of TEAM is using the quick report button. This would create a report on any of the images we had found, placing them on a pre-existing template. However, in this case, we did not want the template. There are two more options that we tried for this data set. On the bottom of the data set panel, there is an export button. We clicked it and selected the files we wanted to export, however the files that were presented were not in the file type we would have liked. Lastly, I watched another TEAM Software tutorial on exporting data. After going through settings to select the location we would like to export the files and the file type, we were able to then click the "Send to File" button which sent the images to a file in the TIFF file type we preferred.
Task one was then complete, however I still had to do task two. Task two was cleaning up an image for display use. The original image had a number of random grains and color differences that I was assigned to fixing. For this, I used a number of data set cleanup options. First, to get rid of some random grains, I used a Grain Dilation. Next, I used a Grain CI Standardization cleanup to fit some similar grains into larger grains groups. Finally, the option I used that changed the most was the Kernel Smoothing option. This however presented some issues.
Dr. Wallace told me that using Kernel Smoothing does smooth out many of the grains, it also makes the image look blurry and fake. Since the software I was using, OIM, saves all steps of the process, the professors at the LPL picked their favorite image that was somewhere in between the original and before the Kernel Smoothing cleanup.
Below is the before and after with the Kernel Smoothing. Keep in mind, the before and after is not a direct product of Kernel Smoothing, but with various steps in between.
