  We investigate the photometric signature of magnetic flux tubes in the solar
photosphere. We developed two dimensional, static numerical models of isolated
and clustered magnetic flux tubes. We investigated the emergent intensity
profiles at different lines-of-sight for various spatial resolutions and
opacity models. We found that both geometric and photometric properties of
bright magnetic features are determined not only by the physical properties of
the tube and its surroundings, but also by the particularities of the
observations, including the line/continuum formation height, the spatial
resolution and the image analyses techniques applied. We show that some
observational results presented in the literature can be interpreted by
considering bright magnetic features to be clusters of smaller elements, rather
than a monolithic flux tube.
