We will look at some tools that ImageJ offers developers to deal with images and their processing. In the previous chapter, we looked at macros to perform common image-processing steps. This was already an improvement over the processing of time series one frame at a time, but ImageJ supports more tools and constructs that allow you to expand these basic tools further. In this chapter, we will look at some of these constructs as a preparation for the upcoming chapters, where we will look at plugins and their implementation.

ImageJ has two ways to process in a more automated fashion: macros and plugins. Besides the macros described in the previous chapter, ImageJ also supports other Java-based scripting languages such as Beanshell and JavaScript, as well as the scripting languages Python and Ruby, among others. The plugins can be split into two groups as well: plugins based on the original ImageJ (that is, ImageJ1.x plugins) and those based on the next development...