Typical diamond anvil cell data for multigrain XRD has to be pre-processed and cleaned.

Elements that should be addressed are:

• shadows from the tungsten carbide diamond seats,
• single-crystal diffraction spots from the diamond anvils,
• additional diffraction from very small grains (powder rings), pressure media, etc.

Processing of the single-crystal diffraction spots from the diamond anvils is performed using the timelessDiamondSpotRemoval script, which is part of the TIMEleSS tools.

The idea is that diamond diffraction is

• very intense (often saturate the detector),
• extends over many pixels (in X and Y) and in ω.

The timelessDiamondSpotRemoval script does the following - reduce the resolution of the image, to make it blur and get rid of the small features, - apply a median filter on the reduced image to clear out small diffraction spots, which are probably originating from the sample, - detect diamond diffraction spots based on a threshold in intensity, - create a mask based on the detected diamond diffraction spots, - expand the mask in X, Y, and ω to account for the fact that the real diamond diffraction spots are wider and appear over wider omega ranges than detected by the above steps.