Combining manual and blob picking for extraction

Hi again,

Sorry for all the different posts. I was wondering how the picking works in Live, as I have some results using the blob picker but I would like to combine it with manual picks.

If I hit “Start manual extraction” in the Manual Tab of the Picking job, will I lose all the extracted particles from the blob picker, or it will only add those manually picked to the already extracted ones from the blob picker? I don’t want to test it on my own as I have a lot of micrographs/particles and I’m afraid I will lose them if I try to combine the two.

Thanks in advance.

Hi @LTP,

Thanks for the question.

Manually picked particles can only be used for creating templates for the Template Picker (by navigating to the Picking tab > Template sub-tab and in the “2D Classification from Latest Exposures” section, selecting “Manual Picks” for the “Classify” dropdown option).
When you hit “Start Manual Extraction”, the particles you’ve manually picked thus far will be extracted so that they are available for template generation. You cannot use manually picked particles for Streaming 2D Classification, Ab-Initio Reconstruction, or Streaming Homogeneous Refinement.
Even after you hit “Start Manual Extraction”, your blob picks will remain as your “active picks” and will be used for downstream processing.
To clarify, only blob picked particles or template picked particles can be used for downstream processing.
So for example, your blob picks will only be “replaced” if you hit “Activate for All” or “Activate for Future” in the Template sub-tab. At that point, the template picks will become your active picks to be used for downstream processing.

Hi @stephan,

Thanks for your reply!

Good to know. Maybe would it be possible in the future to add the option to combine between types of picking? Would be useful for some projects.