The digital images submitted along with a manuscript must be minimally processed.  A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication. However, the final image should properly represent the original data and conform to community standards.

Editors may request the unprocessed data files to assist in manuscript evaluation during the peer review process and if the author is unable to provide these data then, we may need to stop the peer review process until we received the raw data.  We may also request raw data even after the publication of the research manuscript if any issues that may occur with published papers. Therefore, we request you to kindly preserve the unprocessed data and metadata files after even after publication of the research paper.

Authors should also take care to avoid misrepresentation during data acquirement.  Kindly give all details regarding image gaining tools and image processing software packages used and document key image-gathering settings and processing manipulations in the Material and Methods section of the manuscript.

If the images are collected at different times or from different places should not be combined into a single image, in such cases the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and the explanation should be given in the legend.
Touch-up tools use, like cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that intentionally obscures manipulations are unacceptable.