Kevin, MERDAT sounds like an interesting program.
Delphi 7.... A nice OOP language. I did a fair amount of programming in Delphi a decade ago...
OK, some suggestions...
How about a HDR option? Display a brightness distribution and if it is skewed heavily towards the shadows suggest a square root transform - or even a fourth root transform to closer approximate human perception. If the distribution is bimodal ( mostly shadows and highlights with not much in between) then you can do a "fake" HDR by adding 1/3 of the normal image to 2/3 of the square root image.
Or how about applying a vignetting correction filter - ( % of the brightness of a rotated monotonic polynominal )
Or a "white balance" correction ( automatic ( bad idea ) - or from a selected point that is "known" to be white or gray )
Or a difference filter - which consists of computing the difference between images and adding back some multiple of the difference to highlight the differences?
I do most of my processing using imagej - but would consider using MERDAT if most of the common processing that I do were available in the program.
Most of my routine processing is now in imagej Macros.
Here is a sample of some of the routine processing - MER R12 2 filter synthetic color processing.
Notice that I actually create three images - the "standard" R12, a square root stretch and a "fake" HDR using the square root and the "standard" image.
