Viewing grey scale 3d tiff image

How does one go about viewing 3d greyscale files. I want to view the volume and I use imread to load it into matlab. However I can only read it slice by slice, and in order to properly view it that there has to be relative comparison because not all the slices are zero for relative intensity. I'm not sure if you need to account for this to view translucency. Any help. The slice function doesn't work well for the translucency.