  Over the last decade, the light microscope has become increasingly useful as
a quantitative tool for studying colloidal systems. The ability to obtain
particle coordinates in bulk samples from micrographs is particularly
appealing. In this paper we review and extend methods for optimal image
formation of colloidal samples, which is vital for particle coordinates of the
highest accuracy, and for extracting the most reliable coordinates from these
images. We discuss in depth the accuracy of the coordinates, which is sensitive
to the details of the colloidal system and the imaging system. Moreover, this
accuracy can vary between particles, particularly in dense systems. We
introduce a previously unreported error estimate and use it to develop an
iterative method for finding particle coordinates. This individual-particle
accuracy assessment also allows comparison between particle locations obtained
from different experiments. Though aimed primarily at confocal microscopy
studies of colloidal systems, the methods outlined here should transfer readily
to many other feature extraction problems, especially where features may
overlap one another.
