Let me try to explain it.
If the image is uint8 it expects the image to be in the range 0-255.
If the image is uint16 it expects the image to be in the range 0-65535.
If the image is double, imshow() assumes the image will be in the range 0-1. Anything below 0 will show up as black. Anything more than 1, like 100 or 255, will show up as white. Your image was all more than 1 so that's why it showed up as all white. There are two "fixes" for this:
The first is to scale your data by dividing it by 255, 65535, or the max value of your image to scale it to the 0-1 range. Then you can use imshow(X) to see the image without clipping to black or white. X is a bad name for an image by the way. You can also change/scale your data by calling one of these:
Of course you can also stick the scaled/changed data back into your original array X if you want.
The other way doesn't require you to change or scale your data, you just use [] in imshow:
This is the way I do it because I usually don't like to change the range of my data - sometimes it causes confusion later. What this does is to take the min of your data and make it black, and the max of your data and make it white. Like if the data went from 40 to 190, 40 would show up as black (0) and 190 as white (255). You can put numbers inside the [] to specify the output range and you can also specify the input range so basically you can do any kind of "window and leveling" (as they call it in the medical field) that you want. In other words, you can have whatever value you want for the min show up as whatever output brightness you want. Same for the max/brightest value. And values in between are scaled linearly in brightness.
Does that explain it well enough? If not, ask questions, especially with specific numbers, and I'll answer them.
