Forty grains applied for the job. One of them is already standing the way you need.
You mapped your sample with EBSD. One grain in that rainbow is already sitting the way your specimen needs: a lamella looking straight down a zone axis, a cantilever with its cleavage plane lying flat, a micropillar squeezed along a chosen direction. Your test is only as good as the crystal you cut it from, and that choice happens here, before the first trench. This page does the orientation math for you. Pick a target; it finds the grain and tells you how to turn the stage. Load your own map if you have one: it never leaves your browser.
An EBSD map is a grid of answers to one repeated question: at this pixel, how is the crystal lattice rotated relative to the sample? The answer is stored as three Euler angles per pixel, and the familiar coloring (the inverse pole figure, IPF) just asks each grain which crystal direction happens to point along the surface normal, ND.
That is exactly the information a liftout needs. If you want a micropillar compressed along [001], you need a grain where [001] already points out of the surface. If you want a lamella you can view down [011], you need a grain where [011] lies flat in the surface, waiting to become the foil normal. The map knows which grains those are; this page just asks it properly, symmetry included.
Directions look the same in all three cubic lattices; the centering changes which reflections exist, not where [uvw] points. In hexagonal crystals c/a matters, and a plane normal is not the same as the direction with matching indices.
Drag to turn the specimen; click a tinted face to assign it. In 2D, clicking a face also snaps the view flat onto it.
Hovering a pixel in OIM or AZtec shows its Bunge Euler angles. Type them here (degrees) and get the verdict for the current target, no export needed.
Stage rotation spins the sample flat, about its own normal. Every crystal direction keeps its tilt; only its compass heading changes. So rotation can point a feature, never tip one. The tipping was bought in step 3, when you picked the grain.
The colored chunk is your grain: real outline from the map, unit cell and step-2 features inside. It turns with the stage. The ghost shape is the future specimen, and it does NOT turn: the pattern mills where the beams are, so the specimen is fixed to the chamber. Drive the stage below and watch the grain turn through the ghost until the crystal offers exactly what you asked for. The corner readout shows this grain's Euler angles twice: as the map recorded them, and as they stand under the beams right now. At the load position the two lines agree. Drag to orbit.
Drag the slider, or scrub the plot itself: this is the stage rotation, the one knob you turn. The grain above turns with your hand, and the dot rides the curve. Watch the amber arc up there: it is the gap between the red arrow and its green target line, and it shrinks or grows as you turn. The snap button sweeps the stage until the arrow lands on the little green circle (that circle is where R★ puts it), the arc counts down to zero, and the tick appears. Try it at the Load position (tilt 0) and watch the Euler readout: turning R winds only φ₁, while Φ and φ₂ never move, and those two ARE your desired orientation. For a foil, the dip at R★ is the rotation doing its job. For a pillar or cantilever the red line stays flat, and that is the other half of the lesson: the grain you picked in step 3 bought that number, not the stage.
No grain is perfectly ideal. The tilt always stays at the standard positions, so whatever angle your grain leaves over lands in your experiment instead. Slide the deviation and watch what it costs (drag the scene to orbit); the button snaps back to the grain this map actually picked.
The recipe leaves the TEM a small angle δ to absorb, and here is the part most people miss: that leftover is a rotation about the lamella's long axis, because the stage rotation already turned the zone axis square across the foil. So which holder knob absorbs it is decided the moment you weld the lamella to the grid, not at the microscope. Clamp the grid with the long axis along the holder rod and the α tilt does all of it; clamp it across the rod and the whole correction lands on the smaller β tilt, which may not reach. Anywhere in between, it splits. Drag the clamp angle and watch the walk change.
The bright slab is your lamella on the grid. The arrow is the zone axis, δ off the beam. Welding the lamella with its long axis along the rod is the habit worth building: it hands the whole correction to the big α tilt and keeps β free for tilting to other zones once you are on this one.
Oxford Instruments' EBSD acquisition-geometry documentation (detector distance, pattern-centre placement, working-distance examples); Mingard et al., Ultramicroscopy 179 (2017) on traceable EBSD geometry calibration; the ebsd.info community overview of detector geometry; and Bunge's Texture Analysis in Materials Science for the Euler-angle convention. Column and tilt angles follow Thermo Fisher dual-beam geometry (52°), with Zeiss (54°) and Tescan (55°) noted where they differ.
@misc{tripathy2026liftoutplanner,
author = {Tripathy, Manisha},
title = {Which Grain Do I Lift Out? Site-Specific FIB Lift-Out from EBSD Maps},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://untetheredatom.com/insitu/ebsd-liftout-planner}},
note = {Interactive planning tool}
}