Two color transformations, as described herein, facilitate identification of the objects of interest in the biological specimen. One of the color transformations, a Minus Clear Plus One (MC+1) transformation, can be conceptualized as either translating and rotating axes of a three-dimensional coordinate space that defines an image of the biological specimen or calculating differences between vectors in the three dimensional coordinate space that defines the image of the biological specimen. The other of the color transformations, a Quantitative Chromatic Transformation (QCT), is a calorimetric transformation that produces three new quantities from the original red, green, and blue pixel values for each color pixel of an image. These three new quantities, X, Y, and Z can each be related to the quantitative amount of absorbing molecules sampled by that pixel. Application of one or both of the color transformations to the image of the biological specimen results in a transformed image, in which objects of interest are more readily identifiable.