  Area detectors are used in many scientific and technological applications
such as particle and radiation physics. Thanks to the recent technological
developments, the radiation sources are becoming increasingly brighter and the
detectors become faster and more efficient. The result is a sharp increase in
the size of data collected in a typical experiment. This situation imposes a
bottleneck on data processing capabilities, and could pose a real challenge to
scientific research in certain areas. This article proposes a number of simple
techniques to facilitate rapid and efficient extraction of data obtained from
these detectors. These techniques are successfully implemented and tested in a
computer program to deal with the extraction of X-ray diffraction patterns from
EDF image files obtained from CCD detectors.
