Development has been speeding along at our Swedish Headquarters and we are very pleased to implement fully automatic warping of your 2D gel images in REDFIN Solo ahead of time.
The fully automatic warping feature (“auto-warp” for short) allows you to warp all your spot patterns on top of each other by the press of a button. Simply set the the warp area in the wizard and let the algorithms do the rest for you.
Here’s a 3 minute video showing you how it works:
In case you are wondering how you can get your hands on the auto-warp feature: just start up REDFIN on your computer and it will automatically update itself to include auto-warping. If you don’t have REDFIN installed yet, download it for free at www.ludesi.com/download.
Remember that the quality of the warping is one of the main factors determining the overall quality of the analysis results. The better you manage to align the spot patterns the more exact the spot borders can be placed on all gel images. So make sure you don’t rush through the warping step, but take the time to ensure you have achieved the best possible alignment.
REDFIN Solo makes it very easy for you to fine-tune the warping until you are happy. If after the first auto-warp run you are not satisfied, you can simply delete all automatically placed warp anchors whilst keeping the manual ones you placed yourself. Add a few more manual vectors and re-run the auto-warp until you are happy.
Another useful tip is to set a good warp area. If your scanned gel image includes part of the scanner bed or labels, make sure to not include them in the warp area. Similarly, don’t include highly variable noise such as the dye front, streaks, or smears that are located around the edges of the gel image as they can interfere with the warping.
Our internal testing results have shown that the REDFIN Solo auto-warp preforms very well on all types of 2D gel images used, however, we are always very interested to hear your experiences with it. And seeing that REDFIN Solo is now absolutely free for anyone to use for the entire summer, there really is nothing stopping you from giving it a try… 
Filed under: New features in REDFIN, Tips and Tricks , warping
