Adequate images of real tablets provide the possibility to validate in silico software tools like F-CAD. The goal of this work was to evaluate the influence of different pre-processing methods of X-ray micro-computed tomography images of 12 different tablet batches. The images were processed with the open source software ImageJ. Different bleachand lightning corrections were applied. The influence of a filtering process and two different contrast enhancement methods were evaluated. The images were segmented with the k-means algorithm and F-CAD determined the recovery rates. All results were analysed in terms of their desirability. Suitable pathways were found for each binary mixture. The mean recovery rates for all batches were approximately 100%. However, it was not possible to find a suitable program procedure to cover all binary mixtures simultaneously. Nevertheless, it was possible to confirm the possibility of a suitable validation method for in silico tools. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.