2.4 Preparing Your Image Data

A digitized image of a stained gel or autoradiogram must be available in some accessible file. The image may be in a raw binary file; if so, the user needs to know the dimensions (number of rows and columns), the pixel size, and the size of any prepended header. The image may also be of the "import" variety, which is described in Section 1.3.3.1 and in Appendix A.6. If an image is to be analyzed, two additional files are needed: a gel-format file (Appendix A.3) and a template-definition file (Appendix A.4).