Using x-ray images in Adobe Photoshop requires turning them into readable files.
X-ray imagery presents the unseen world of the body in contrastive black and white. When commercial art and popular culture use radiographic images as artwork, the result can be a temporary style trend. Getting those images into image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop requires some prep work to access their visual data. How you accomplish this objective depends on whether you're dealing with traditional film-based x-rays or with their digital equivalents stored in medical-imaging file formats.
Instructions
Analog X-Rays
1. Obtain any required permissions to use the x-rays. These may include signed releases from medical personnel and from the patient whose images you seek to digitize.
2. Scan the x-rays on a flatbed scanner with a transparency adapter or other high-resolution scanner capable of accommodating transparent media of the size you're digitizing. Media size depends on the type of x-ray, with dental radiography defining the small end of the continuum.
3. Acquire your scans at the full uninterpolated resolution of the scanning device, and at its highest bit depth. If the scanner can generate 16-bit RGB scans, the flexibility of access to the increased color range will offset the larger size of these files.
4. Save your scans in an uncompressed file format such as TIFF. Don't limit the usefulness of your scans by saving them in JPEG or other compressed file formats that achieve small file sizes by discarding visual information.
5. Open your scans in Adobe Photoshop and filter, scale, colorize or retouch them so they suit your creative purpose. Save your altered version of each file under a new file name.
Digital X-Rays
6. Obtain any required permissions to use the x-rays. These may include signed releases from medical personnel and from the patient whose images you seek to digitize.
7. Download and install an open-source medical image converter application capable of translating the DICOM file data or other medical imaging data standard into the graphic file format you prefer, such as TIFF or PNG. These conversion applications support Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.
8. Open the digital x-ray data files in the image converter software you acquired. Save your x-ray visuals in an uncompressed Adobe Photoshop-compatible file format such as TIFF.
9. Open your scans in Adobe Photoshop and filter, scale, colorize or retouch them so they suit your creative purpose. Save your altered version under a new file name.
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