ImageJ and FIJI are free. FIJI is just ImageJ with better updating features. Look at Set Measurements and then at Analyze Particles to record particle measurements. Depending on what statistics you want, you may have to save the results table to a stats program or a spreadsheet. A nice feature is that you can turn on Record Macro, then do your analysis using the pull-down menus, and it will record the commands needed to repeat the analysis. There are tutorials and even YouTube videos on these steps.

If I understand the question, you have images of crystals and have been asked to estimate each crystal's shape and size, and perhaps to create a histogram of shapes and sizes. As Charles Anderson points out, ImageJ is a fine, free and open-source GUI-enabled application for performing such tasks. Your post suggests that ImageJ is not appropriate for some reason. If not, why not?

Learning to program is a really good long-term investment, regardless of your intended career path. For image analysis, being able to program is particularly important because your particular images are likely to have quirks that confound other peoples' prepackaged software solutions. Codeacademy.com might be a good place to start learning.

Not sure if this will meet your needs, but I use OpenCV, GIMP and Octave which are all great open source tools. GIMP (GNU Image Processing) is a basic GUI menu driven application, but has interactive transforms and basic image processing operations (installs on Windows and Linux). I use Octave much the way MATLAB is used (on Windows and Linux), but it is more of an interactive interpreted programming environment. If you could learn Python (I think easier than learning C/C++ programming), then you could use the Python API for OpenCV, which is fantastic - http://docs.opencv.org/trunk/doc/py_tutorials/py_tutorials.html OpenCV, Octave, and GIMP get me by most of the time and if not, then I break out C/C++ and write my own image transformations, but check out the tutorials and perhaps it's not such a bad place to start. I got a group of non-programmer's hooked on Python at a former work place and they still love it!

Hi Charles, Thanks a lot. I had installed FIJI already, and it is easy to use yes. I wanted to know if there are other programs someone might recommend. I will check the advanced features and youtube, good idea.. looking forward.

Hi Prof Grier, thanks for your time. I think your post and that of Dr Siewert have one main advice: learn programming, even a simple language :)

I signed up to the codeacademy, cool, can even learn how to do my own website.

Thanks Sam, I have installed Octave. After a good search I found the link for version 3.8 which has a semi graphical interface: http://mxeoctave.osuv.de/

Best wishes. T

Free, graphical interface, modern, no programming knowledge... that's the idea behind Icy (http://icy.bioimageanalysis.org). You might be especially interested by the Spot detector (http://icy.bioimageanalysis.org/plugin/Spot_Detector) and Protocols (http://icy.bioimageanalysis.org/plugin/Protocols) plug-ins for your specific needs.

Worth a try anyway.

Well based on my experience ImageJ and Fiji are the best image processing analysis software. Another advantage is ImageJ and Fiji are opensource. So I'm agree with David why ImageJ is not appropriate for drug crystals? If you having difficult with programming you can learn from youtube how to use ImageJ and Fiji. Icy also a good image processing analysis and as long as I know we can run ImageJ in Icy (thank to Dufour and the team that already developed Icy).

Thank you so much Dwi!

You also might want to check CellProfiler Software (http://www.cellprofiler.org/), even though this software is frequently use for cell images analysis. But same with Icy we also can run ImageJ in CellProfiler. And you can also discuss your problem in CellProfiler forum (http://www.cellprofiler.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=c24547c5c9d138523115adecf2b5e7de).