Thank you for the quick responses. I apologize for crossposting. I am new and I must have missed the option when I posted and wasn’t aware that I did. I will be more careful in the future.
The camera I am using is a Q-Imaging Retiga EXi which is a digital CCD camera which mounts on a microscope for live cell imaging. The streaming image to the front panel has great contrast/brightness/resolution, so I am pretty sure that the settings on the camera/microscope are correct for my purposes. The problem seems to occur only when I export.
The image type is Grayscale I16 if that helps (before I export). When I do a histogram of the image the values are between 0 and 4095. I did not test this using MAX as I am not sure how to do that.
I have now discovered that if I export to PNG instead of TIF, the contrast is perfect (exactly as in the streaming image). Does that help with understanding my problem? Unfortunately, PNG is one of the few image types that my post-processing software won’t open. I know I can convert it from PNG to TIF using other software (ex MATLAB), but I would rather just export to something besides PNG in the first place.
oops...I forgot to attach the sample file inputs. For whatever reason it would not allow me to attach the tif format file. Therefore, I have attached two png files.
test.png = an unaltered image exported directly from my vi
test2.png = the tif file being exported (only converted into a png, but with low contrast maintained)