Achieving better performance for multiphoton imaging requires building better laser sources. Two laser designs are presented, each for a different target application. The first design generates few nanojoule ultrafast pulses between 1100 – 1300 nm. This approach uses cascaded soliton propagation in the LP02 mode of two higher order mode fibers to produce 3.5 nJ, 55 fs pulses at 1175 nm. The second design uses a high power, tunable repetition rate fiber chirped pulse amplification system at 1550 nm to generate energetic solitons in a photonic crystal rod with an effective mode area of 2300 µm2. These solitons are frequency doubled to produce 64 nJ, 53 fs pulses at 940 nm. Through an in vivo imaging comparison experiment, it is shown that this new source can obtain an order of magnitude more signal for the same average power compared to a Ti:S oscillator.