A crime has been committed, police have a suspect, but how do they prove guilt?

They need evidence. Like photos of the highly magnified gunshot fragments.

While forensic science is finding the photos taken by scanning electron microscopes of vital importance in solving a case, they are also used by scientists, educators and commercial industry.

Up till now they've been in black and white. Or fuzzy colour.

But now with the company Dindima, CSIRO scientists have developed a software system that colours the minute details of the images, making the object easier to see and enabling a better interpretation of the image.

This is a Bryozoa, a marine invertebrate not big enough for the eye to see. This is the skin of an eggshell. And this handsome creature is a wood borer.

"In the electron microscope you can acquire back scattered information or back scattered electrons which give you atomic number contrast, so every element has a slightly different grey level and we use the secondary information which gives you the roughness or texture of the sample. We can assign a colour to a specific grey level and assign colour to the roughness of the sample of the surface."

A major advantage of this system is that it doesn't involve extra hardware, the system will be cheaper and can be run on the average home personal computer.

Being able to see images magnified up to one million times in colour allows a glimpse into worlds normally unseen to the human eye.

It provides a fantastic tool in not only solving crimes, but in helping scientists and industry, while giving entomologists a closer look at faces that only a mother could love.