Enhancement – Pack

”Pack” will adjust the contrast of the input image and convert it to an 8-bit unsigned integers. By default, it looks at the “statistics” of the whole image and linearly stretches the values to maximize the visibility. You may indicate a ”window” from which ”Pack” will get the data to compute the statistics for the image. Instead of “statistics”, you can use the “extremes” and stretch between the max and min values. Also, you can convert the output to 16-bit integer values or 32-bit or 64-bit floating point values.

By default, Show will internally convert any non 8-bit input to 8-bit integers so that it can display the image. The original data is stored in memory and can be passed on to any modules that follow Show.

On the other hand, in writing out an image to be distributed for display, the image must be converted to 8-bit integers by Pack before being written out to the disk by WriteImage.

Non 8-bit images can be written out by WriteImage, but they may not be displayable by other viewers.