This panel contains controls for copying images from one buffer to another, saving images to file, and setting options that govern how buffers are treated during image acquisition and storage.
Copy Active Image to Buffer
This row of buttons will copy the active image to another buffer. The active image is either the current image in the main window, or the image in a secondary window, if there is a secondary window that has the input focus (title bar highlighted rather than gray). The first four buttons from the left will copy to buffers A through D, respectively. The fifth button has a spin button control to allow you to dial up any other buffer in the program. The 'New' button will copy the image into a new secondary image window.
SAVE A
This button will save the image in buffer A to a file. If there is no image file open yet, you will first enter the File Properties and Save As dialog boxes to specify a file. This file will become the open image file, available for further saving.
Save Active Image
This button will save the active image to a file. The active image is either the current image in the main window, or the image in a secondary window, if there is a secondary window that has the input focus (title bar highlighted rather than gray). If there is no image file open yet, you will first enter the File Properties and Save As dialog boxes to specify a file. This file will become the open image file, available for further saving.
Current file selector
This combo box shows the number and name of the current image file and lets you switch from one open image file to another. Image file names are also displayed in the program's title bar, and if there are multiple files open, their names will be shown after their file numbers, with the current file enclosed in brackets. Montaging will be activated or deactivated as appropriate for the file being switched to. If you switch between files when a tilt series is stopped, the correct file will be selected again when you resume.
Memory usage output
The line with 'Memory = xx MB' shows a summary of the program's memory usage for all image data, including viewable images in buffers and gain and dark references.
Roll Buffers spin button
This control governs how many images are preserved by being moved to higher buffers when a new image is acquired. For example, if the panel says 'Roll Buffers A -> C', then when a new image is acquired, the image in A will be moved to B, the image in B moved to C, and the image in C deleted. (An exception to this occurs when the image in A was acquired in a continuous acquisition.) The up and down arrows will increase and decrease the number of images rolled through the buffers, respectively. Although there are 20 buffers (A to T), rolling is limited to the first 14 (up to N). With one or two after that used as default autoalignment reference buffers, and the one after that used by default as the buffer to read images into, there will still always be at least 3 buffers protected from rolling and other program operations and available for image storage.
Delete
Use this button to delete the image in the current buffer when the main window is active. Deleting large images will help when the program begins to run out of memory.
Autoalign to B
Ordinarily, an image in buffer A is autoaligned to the image in the buffer after the last rolling buffer, which means that a reference image placed there will be preserved as new images are taken. With this option selected, images will be aligned to buffer B instead, which allows successive images to be aligned to each other without copying one to another buffer.
Read Buffer spin button
This control governs what buffer images are placed into when they are read from a file. If you never use this control, the Read Buffer will be maintained to be two buffers past the last rolling buffer, or three buffers when in low dose mode. Thus, changing the number of buffers to roll, or going into or out of low dose mode, will generally change the Read Buffer. However, if you select a different buffer to read into with this control, then these automatic changes may not occur. This selection is free to go to the highest buffer, T.
Protect unsaved Record images
Selecting this option will protect images acquired with the Record parameter set from being deleted if they have not been saved to file. You will have to confirm that you want to delete such an image.