[kamocat]

The NI Vision Assistant that RoboMaster mentioned is actually quite easy to use - at least, it's easier than building the VI yourself from scratch.
It lets you use images already stored on your computer, or you can hook up your axis camera and aquire images directly from that.
The image processing VIs can run on your computer as well as the cRIO, so that makes it easier to test.

One thing to note:
IMAQ uses the same memory space to store the image as it manipulates it. If you want to duplicate the image or extract multiple color planes, make sure to create a new memory space; otherwise the image you intended to preserve will get written over.