Version 1.1 of Snuffler Released

The latest version of my geophysics software, Snuffler,  has made an appearance. What wonders are there to be seen this time around?

The main new feature is channel merging. This is where you can display multiple plots on the same image, for example a magnetometry and resistivity plot. The one restriction is that the grid layouts of the various surveys must be on the same alignment, but apart from that, the grids needn't be the same size, shape, be in the same place, or be at the same resolution. Here is an example. The survey is of a  medieval farmstead that was in use until quite recently, and is now in a woodland, under some trees. The magnetometry is in red, and the resistivity is in green. As you can see from the top-right corner of the image, there is a high resistance feature that has a large magnetic halo around it. This is the whole point of the channel merging idea, comparing the location of features on different plots.

Also added is manual destriping. If you have areas of particularly high magnetism in your magnetometry survey, the normal destriping tool may struggle to get it right. You could always use the Modify Selection tool, but that isn't particularly fast. Now you can simply select a line to modify using Ctrl  + mouse drag, and then use the two new buttons in the toolbar to add or subtract 0.5. The selection of the line will be hidden, though not de-selected, to aid visual comparison with adjacent lines.

Finally, I wanted to speed up the screen drawing a bit, as Snuffler can be a bit sluggish at times, especially with large images. One of the things that was slowing it down was having to support the dot density plot. I was thinking of how to speed up this part of the software, when I suddenly realised, 'Why on earth would you want to use the dot density plot?'. Let me give you a bit of background on that. When archaeological geophysics first started out, computer equipment was a lot less sophisticated. Everything was in monochrome, unlike today, where you can display and print in shades of grey. A 4x4 square of pixels, with various pixels black or white, will give you 16 'shades'. This restricts you to having a single reading a minimum of 4 pixels wide, and it still wont look anywhere near as good as a proper grey scale. The dot density plot is an anachronism, and needs to go. No-one should be using it any more, so the choice to me was clear, dot density had to go. But where I taketh away, I also giveth. I had been asked if I could provide a greater number of grey shades for the display. Snuffler had supported 16 and 32 shades of grey, now there is an option for 64. When I first wrote Snuffler, 16 shades of grey was 'browser safe', i.e. you could be sure that any browser could display all the shades. I'm sure browser technology has moved on since then. Not all surveys will benefit greater from 64 shades of grey, but here is part of an image which shows that off to an extent. The graduation of colours shows up nicely in the alluvium next to the Roman port.

The difference between the 16 shades at the top and the 32 shades in the middle is obvious, but I must admit that I struggle to see much difference between the 32 shades and the 64 shades at the bottom. I am assured that some people can. On the subject of shading, I found some interesting blog posts about why colour shading is a really bad idea, but don't worry, I wont be removing those.

You can of course download the new version of Snuffler at the usual place.