I am looking for an easy way to (semi)-automate cell size measurments of phase, brightfield or DIC images of fission yeast cells (e.g. surface, lenght and width).
I am currently trying to get an idea of what people use and to evaluate the different solutions. It would be great to get as many different ideas and suggestions as possible.

Cheers, Frank

Try Cell Profiler, an open source project from the Whitehead Institute:

http://www.cellprofiler.org/

It would be nice if people could integrate this type of software with Image J and make a really useful image analysis package that is freely available to scientists.

Cellprofiler seems to be a very good program, however, you can buy off the shelf stuff that is better. The problem with open source is, well its open. People tinker with it and it never really becomes a truly great program. A great program costs money because people have spent time to develope it. Tell me, when is the last time you volunteered to work for someone for months, years and not get paid? It is hard to pay the bills when you are not getting paid. Integration of these two software products will not happen until someone pony's up the money to make it happen. Oh and by the way the reason open source products are open, is that someone got a grant or other free money, so they can eat, to make open source software. Open source is not really free, some person or company paid for it. Heck it may have been NIH funded or other government funding, then it was you and I that really paid for it.