False Colour

I've spent the better part of the day figuring out how to create a false color RGB image out of three grayscale images in Photoshop. One thing I can do easily with my synchrotron data is generate elemental image "maps", but each one is a single grayscale image. The ultimate goal is to take those image maps and combine them into a nice publishable false color image, but I've never taken the time to figure it out until today. With some help from the internet, I found out that Photoshop not only lets you edit images in terms of "layers" but also individual color "channels" (it's a separate tab). So you can just paste the grayscale images into different color channels (one for red, one for blue, and one for green) instead of different layers, and voila!...instant RGB image. I spent some time playing around with levels and curves and filters and blending and transparency until I found a method that seems to work consistently well. In the image above red is carbon, green is calcium, and blue is iron.