These notes are intended as an introduction to effective use of ImageJ, a mature image-processing platform created by the National Institute of Health (NIH).
There are many excellent ImageJ tutorials and resources available online. Notable examples include:
Whilst having been initiated for the medical and biological sciences, ImageJ, because of it’s extensible nature and large variety of plugins is now used in many disciplines requiring image processing.
A note about these notes!
These notes are not intended to be a comprehensive guide to all ImageJ functions and techniques; there are already many excellent online tutorials (some of which are listed above).
Rather than rehashing and rephrasing the contents of these other resources, the point of this workshop is to provide an environment for you to practice using ImageJ, with demonstrators at hand to help when you need it.
A core component of this workshop is the idea that you would be able to practice what you’ve learned with help at hand.
During each session, after you have completed the exercises scheduled for that session you are invited to work on your own data on tasks relevant to your research. We will be at hand to help you out when you get stuck!
For both environmental reasons and to ensure that you have the most up-to-date version, we recommend that you work from the online version of these notes.
A printable, single page version of these notes is available here.
Please email any typos, mistakes, broken links or other suggestions to j.metz@exeter.ac.uk.
If you want to use imagej on your own computer I would recommend using Fiji which can be downloaded from
Fiji is ImageJ with additional functionality and bundled plugins.
Alternatively standard ImageJ can be downloaded from