(a, b, c) surface brightness profiles of synthetic images in which noise is added to mimic a real image. In (a) the image has only a bulge and a disk, whereas in (b) and (c) a small bar is added on top of the disk. Black dots show the pixel values of the synthetic images, and the other symbols show the functions fitted to the 2-dimensional images, as explained in the text. (d, e, f) the residual images for the above decompositions are shown. They are obtained by subtracting the total decomposition model from the original synthetic image. The figure is a modified version of Figure 2 in Laurikainen et al. [62].
