paintlib - C++ - Features

Bitmap Operations

paintlib works on bitmaps. The abstract class PLBmp defines an interface for bitmap storage and manipulation. The actual details of storage are defined in derived classes. The contents of a bitmap can be changed either via Filter objects or by directly accessing the bits. Among others, filters for resizing, cropping, rotating and blurring an image are included. PLBmp implements color depth conversion from and to 1,8,24 and 32 bpp. The standard equality and assignment operators are implemented as well and convert between the derived classes transparently. paintlib provides basic classes for pixels, points and rectangles.

Currently, four classes derived from PLBmp are defined: PLWinBmp for windows DIBs (Device Independent Bitmaps), PLAnyBmp for simple OS-independent storage, PLDIBSection for windows DIB sections and the experimental PLDDrawBmp class that stores images in DirectDraw system memory surfaces. New classes can be defined for other operating systems and storage formats, the only restriction being that pixels in one line are stored consecutively and not as separate planes. To be compatible with the decoders, a bitmap class must define formats with 1, 8 and 32 bpp. Bitmaps with alpha channels are supported.

[Bernard Delmées piclook (one of the sample programs) contains PLDrawDibBmp, a derived bitmap class that uses the windows DrawDIB api for blitting.]

There is virtually no difference in speed between using the OS-independent interface and directly accessing OS-dependent data. The power of this design is demonstrated by the testdib demo. This demo includes classes which implement complex bitblts with alpha information, resizing, and transparency in an OS-independent fashion. The classes are documented in the read.me file in the testdib directory.

Filters

Filters encapsulate operations on bitmaps. To the user of the library, a filter is similar to a function that can be called for a bitmap. However, filters are independent of the actual bitmap class: Each filter works with every bitmap class. In addition, putting filters in separate classes allows you to use filters as part of a command pattern: you can put filters in a queue and parameterize algorithms with different filters, among others. Here is a list of some of the filters currently included with paintlib:

- Contrast
- Crop
- Extract alpha channel
- Convert to grayscale
- Intensity
- Lightness
- Color quantization (conversion of true-color images to 256 colors)
- Bilinear resize
- Gaussian blur
- Threshold

Image File Decoding

paintlib can decode image files and store the data in an object of any of the PLBmp-derived classes. Supported file formats are GIF, PGM, PPM, PNG, TGA, TIFF, JPEG, PCX, Photoshop PSD, Windows BMP, and Mac PICT as well as TIFF previews in EPS files. Support for PNG is through the PNG reference library libpng. TIFF is supported through use of Sam Leffler's libtiff. This library is the most complete implementation of the TIFF standard that I know of. The Independent JPEG Group's libjpeg provides solid support for the JPEG/JFIF format. The GIF decoder uses libungif (maintained by Eric Raymond). The Photoshop decoder allows access to the individual layers saved in the file as separate bitmaps..

Be aware that using a gif decoder in your program can might cause legal problems - see the libungif documentation for details. If you'd like to use paintlib without gif support, you can compile it without this support. In fact, you can exclude support for any file types you don't need.

The library is capable of auto-detection of the image file type. Input data can come from memory or disk - or from a custom data source. Under windows, images linked into the .exe as resources can also be loaded. All data is converted to 32 bpp before being handed to the application. 1 bpp tiffs are an exception to this rule - they get handed to the application as 1 bpp.

Image File Encoding

The encoding classes store images. Currently implemented are BMP, TIFF (via libtiff), JPEG (via libjpeg) and PNG (via libpng). Data storage is handled by data sink classes. A data sink for disk files is provided; others can be implemented.

Open Design

One of the primary design goals for paintlib was openness for expansion. Implementing additional en- and decoders is simple because many basic operations (data source management, MSB/LSB conversion, error handling,...) have been taken care of already. Integrating libpng, for example, took Gilles and me about two days (total) of work. The data sources and sinks and the bitmap format can be tailored to suit the needs of the users. The filter interface is very thin, so creating new filters is easy.

While most of the development is being done under Microsoft Visual C++, paintlib is plattform-independent and *nix configure files are available. This plattform independence causes no performance degradation that we know of.