Resolution, contrast, depth of field, and optical system design calculators for microscopy.
61 calculators
Calculate the Airy disk radius and Abbe diffraction limit from wavelength and numerical aperture.
Compare 3D reconstruction approaches: resolution, sampling, voxel budgets, and method tradeoffs.
Adaptive optics in Kolmogorov turbulence: Noll's residual after J corrected Zernike modes, deformable-mirror fitting error, the Strehl ratio and the stroke needed, from D/r₀.
Two-lens afocal (telescope and beam expander) systems: afocal spacing, angular magnification, beam size and the ray-transfer matrix, Keplerian or Galilean, and the focal distances when the spacing is off.
Pixel SNR, dark charge against cooling, ADC step and dynamic range of a camera sensor, with sCMOS and cooled-CCD presets.
Cleared tissue imaging: ballistic light fraction with depth, resolution, and the focal shift from an index mismatch.
Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS): wavelengths, focal intensity, lineshapes and excitation bandwidth.
SNR of N fused exposures at a fixed signal per view or a fixed total dose, and the synthetic NA, finest period and space-bandwidth gain of Fourier ptychography.
Replay field λz/Δx, diffraction angle, replay spot and first-order efficiency of a phase-quantised hologram on a pixelated SLM.
Pinhole size in Airy units (1.22 λ/NA × M) and its trade-off between optical section, lateral resolution and signal.
Compare lateral and axial resolution between widefield and confocal microscopy with adjustable pinhole size.
Output noise, SNR gain and transfer function of box, Gaussian and median filters on white Gaussian noise, plus the VisuShrink wavelet threshold σ√(2 ln N).
Microscope depth of field from Inoué's formula, λ₀n/NA² plus the detector term n·e/(M·NA), with the non-paraxial wave term for high NA.
Fresnel reconstruction grid λz/(NΔx), sensor NA and its pixel-pitch limit λ/(2Δx), resolution, depth of focus, largest reference angle and the in-line sampling distance for a digital hologram.
Imaging system dynamic range, noise floor, and ADC-limited performance analysis.
Expansion microscopy effective resolution with pre- or post-expansion labelling, field of view and expanded gel size.
Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy — diffusion time, concentration, and confocal volume.
Object-side field of view and pixel footprint from sensor size and magnification, Nyquist sampling λ/(4NA) and the eyepiece field FN/M.
Compare excitation/emission spectra, spectral overlap, and filter crosstalk.
Calculate diffusion coefficients from Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching data.
Configure hyperspectral data cubes: spectral range, bands, data size, acquisition time, and SNR tradeoffs.
Wiener deconvolution of a diffraction-limited image: the restored transfer H²/(H² + NSR), the largest filter gain and the finest period restored, against the passband limit λ/(2NA).
Rigid, similarity and affine registration: the transform matrix, RMS displacement over the image, control-point target registration error (Fitzpatrick) and the Cramér–Rao bound for intensity-based alignment.
Tiled-mosaic stitching: mosaic size and efficiency from the overlap, blend weights and seam gradient, and how tile position errors grow when chained versus after global optimisation.
Pixel SNR with background, dark charge, read noise and binning; noise budget, and the frames or co-added scans needed for a target SNR.
Köhler illumination settings: field of view FN/M for the field diaphragm, condenser aperture against the objective's back aperture, and the resolution λ/(NA_obj + NA_c).
Light-field microscope design: lateral sample, resolvable spots per lenslet, matched microlens f-number and the depth of field of refocused slices and single views (Levoy 2006).
Gaussian light sheet thickness, Rayleigh range and field of view, and the effective axial resolution of LSFM/SPIM.
Time-domain OCT: interferogram of a reflector, fringe visibility, axial resolution, Doppler carrier 2v/λ, scan times and the shot-noise SNR.
Diffraction-limited incoherent MTF and cutoff 2NA/λ, and the defocused OTF and Strehl ratio with contrast reversal, paraxial (Hopkins) and with the exact high-NA defocus phase, for a circular pupil.
Two-photon excitation depth penetration, resolution, and laser parameters.
NA = 1/(2f/#) for objects at infinity. Relates numerical aperture to f-number.
Coherence time and length of a Gaussian source, OCT axial resolution 0.4413 λ²/(nΔλ), and the shot-noise-limited Fourier-domain SNR and sensitivity.
Optical power in dioptres from focal length, and a two-element eye: total power by Gullstrand's equation, refractive error from the axial length, and contact-lens and spectacle corrections.
Compare optical sectioning capability across widefield, confocal, and multiphoton microscopy techniques.
Localization precision from photons, background and pixel size, and effective resolution with label density, for single-molecule localization microscopy (PALM/STORM).
Contrast calculations for phase contrast and differential interference contrast microscopy.
Initial pressure, diffuse light penetration, acoustic resolution and the skin exposure limit for photoacoustic microscopy and tomography.
Angular field of view per pixel (IFOV) from pixel size, binning and focal length, with the Nyquist frequency and the full field across the sensor.
Plenoptic (light-field) camera design: lenslets and views, microlens f-number matching, refocusable object range, data size and assembly tolerance (Ng 2005).
Visualize the 2D and 1D point spread function (PSF) for a diffraction-limited system.
Microscope exit pupil 500 mm · NA/(M_obj · M_eye) against the eye pupil, and the eyepieces that keep it in the useful 0.5–1 mm range.
Abbe and Rayleigh lateral resolution limits for diffraction-limited imaging.
SHG signal properties, wavelength conversion, and imaging resolution for collagen and other non-centrosymmetric structures.
SHWFS design: spot size, centroid precision, sensitivity, dynamic range, and sub-aperture layout.
Calculate spectral separation, crosstalk, timing budgets, and SNR for multi-channel fluorescence imaging.
Laser speckle: objective and subjective speckle size, contrast from the rms roughness of a Gaussian surface, and contrast reduction by averaging uncorrelated patterns.
Decompose mixed spectral signals into constituent endmember abundances using linear unmixing methods.
Pinhole size, optical sectioning with pinhole crosstalk and its background floor, and frame rate for spinning disk confocal microscopy.
Shot-noise-limited SNR, detection limit, Stokes wavelength, resolution and frame time for stimulated Raman scattering microscopy.
Strehl ratio from an RMS or peak-to-valley wavefront error: the Maréchal approximation against the exact value for defocus, astigmatism, coma or spherical aberration, with the λ/14 and S = 0.8 tolerances.
SIM cut-off frequency, lateral resolution and raw image count for linear and saturated structured illumination microscopy.
SFG wavelength, focal spot, coherence lengths and thin-layer signal power for sum-frequency generation microscopy.
STED and PALM/STORM resolution limits beyond the diffraction barrier.
Magnification change Δm/m = −Δz/(s_EP + Δz) of an ordinary lens against a telecentric lens with a residual chief-ray slope, and the depth of field λ/NA² + e/(m·NA).
Image distance, magnification and conjugate ratio of a thin lens, from the object distance or from the magnification, for real and virtual images.
THG wavelength, focal intensity and source size, and signal scaling with power and depth, for label-free interface imaging.
Calculate resolution, excitation volume, and depth penetration for three-photon excitation microscopy at 1300+ nm.
Evanescent intensity penetration depth, critical angle, objective angle limit and interface intensity for TIRF microscopy.
Objective magnification f_TL/f_obj, camera magnification with a C-mount adapter, visual magnification with an eyepiece, and the useful range 500–1000 × NA.
Calculate resolution, excitation volume, peak intensity, and depth penetration for two-photon fluorescence microscopy.