Content:
The MERGE2CBF utility from XDS can be used to add several diffraction images toether. The resulting image can in principle still be processed as if it was a standard image. However, since these images lack any header information, direct use of them in autoPROC is not possible and we need a small workaround for that.
You will need a wrapper script for the imginfo program autoPROC provides (and uses for reading image header information from all supported formats). Please download the file imginfo_merge2cbf.sh to your computer (or use the above link) and make it executable:
wget http://www.globalphasing.com/autoproc/wiki/plugin/attachments/AutoProcWorkingWithMerge2cbfFiles/imginfo_merge2cbf.sh chmod +x imginfo_merge2cbf.sh
To generate "artificial" header information for the output files from MERGE2CBF, at least one additional file needs to be present in the same directory as these output files: MERGE2CBF.INP (the input file used to generate those images). The above script will try to read this file for determining the name of the first original image file.
If the original images are no longer available (as specified inside the MERGE2CBF.INP file), the first image of the original data collection needs to be present in this directory with the file name reference.img. So please ensure that you keep at least the first image of the original set of images!
It should now be possible to process as usual with autoPROC and the additional command-line argment:
process imginfo=/where/ever/imginfo_merge2cbf.sh ...
Note-1: this has not been extensively tested, so please report any problems back to us (proc-develop@globalphasing.com).
Note-2: the above instructions should not be seen as an endorsement for adding several collected images into a summed 'image'.