Selecting Night Vision toggles the night vision mode on and off. Three types of night vision display are available, selected by a dropdown on the General tab of the File Settings dialog:
Red helps maintain the human eye's dark adaptation, Blue can be useful if your camera is not blue-sensitive, and Dim maintains the color display but reduces the overall intensity to about one-eighth normal.
In red mode, all menus, dialog boxes, etc., are switched to red. Monochrome images are displayed red, but color images are displayed in their normal colors. This allows the user to inspect a color image without switching the entire screen back to normal colors. Red light helps maintain the human eye's dark adaptation because it does not as readily destroy the "visual purple" photosensitive pigment of the scotopic vision system ("rod" cells).
In blue mode, all menus, dialog boxes, and monochrome images are shown in blue. As before, color images are displayed in their normal colors. The blue mode is useful when imaging with CCD cameras because it is the band in which most CCD cameras are least sensitive.
In dim mode, all menus, dialog boxes, and images (both monochrome and color) are displayed at approximately one-eighth normal brightness in order to reduce ambient light conditions in the observatory.
Icons and toolbar buttons are not affected by any night vision mode. If MaxIm DL's toolbars are disturbingly bright during night vision mode, the remedy is to turn them off. We recommend that Windows Classic desktop style be used, to eliminate the bright outlines caused by XP skins.
Since this function changes the "system colors", other applications will be affected to some extent. (The contents of their windows may or may not be altered.) The brightness of the individual colors is selected based upon the brightness of the colors in the current desktop scheme. Therefore changing the desktop scheme prior to initiating Night Vision mode has an effect on the brightness of the various screen elements.
Night vision mode is automatically switched off when MaxIm DL is shut down.
Please note that the use of a red filter over the screen is recommended as superior to using red night vision mode on the computer screen. Most displays, especially LCD displays, still produce a substantial amount of light outside of the deep red area of the spectrum.
Availability of this feature depends on Product Level.