PhotoController is a cool and powerful assembly that process an Image with specialized effects. It is designed for .NET; you could easily use it in Windows.Forms application or ASP.NET application.

PhotoController reads all .NET supported Image types (Bmp, Emf, Exif, GIF, Jpeg, TIF, Wmf, Icon, etc.); it performs compression on Jpeg, GIF, and TIF directly to a file or an Image object.

The assembly offers a solid set of image processing methods, including:

arbitary manipulation (eg. rotation, scaling, crop, flip, canvas); color adjustment (eg. graryscale, color gamma, contrast, lightness, darkness, sepia, etc.);

filter transformation (eg. diffuse, mosaic, smooth, gaussian blur, noise, water, emboss etc.)

feathering any shape area on the image

writing a border on the image (eg. sawtooth, ball3d, brick, etc.)

PhotoController Main Features:

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Purpose

The purpose of PhotoController is to make image processing in .NET easier. Not only works in windows form application but also in Web application. You can write software with PhotoController like ACD FotoCanvas, PaintShop or even PhotoShop.

You do not have to understand GDI+, deep WinAPI, or any knowledge of Image too much. What you need to do is just to initialize PhotoController object, encapsulate the image, call methods and get the result as you want.

Process Image object

PhotoController only processes System.Drawing.Image object, please refer this object in MSDN.

So PhotoController is able to load all image formations that .NET supports by now. If you have other components to load other image formations that .NET does not support now, like PSD, TGA, once you encapsulate it to Image object, you can pass it to PhotoController to process.

Compress image

PhotoController supports to save three image formations with compression now, they are Jpeg, Gif and Tif.

You can save Gif with four compression modes, which are GifAdaptive, GifOctreeQuantizer, GifStandard256, and GifWebSafe. You can even save Gif with a specified transparency color.

Arbitary Transformation

Supports rotation, crop, flip, canvas size, resize an scale.

Image rotation in .NET has a little problem. As we know, after rotation a picture, the canvas size will be changed to fit in the rotated picture. You do not need to count the canvas size by yourself now. With PhotoController, after calling the rotate method, you will get a new size of canvas to fit in the rotated image.

Resize and scale are different. Resize enables to change the original picture's width and height to any new value, either enlarge or reduce. Scale lets you pass a size of a container( ie. a rectangle), then you could get a resized picture to fit in the container.

You can change the canvas size of picture, and specialize the original picture position, just like in PhotoShop we always do.

Color Adjustment

Supports contrast, lightness, darkness, grayscale, sepia, color gamma, invert, transparent, blackwhite and so on.

PhotoController has packed all of these adjustment in methods, you could get the result easier and faster.

Filter Effects

PhotoController supports various filters, including blur, sharpen, edge detection, diffuse, mosaic, water, shear, twirl, sphere, dither, marble and so on. You can even create your customized filters (only in V2.0!).

You may find some filter effects are different from PhotoShop; it's fine, we don't intend to make a PhotoShop in .NET, which is not our purpose. The most fiter algorithms are referenced to HIPR2.

Feather

A new feature after version 1.1

You could select an area on the image in any shape. Feather method will copy the selected region and feather the bound according to the specified band value. You also could choose to copy the feathered image into a new image with either tile image or a specified color.

Feather is a very powerful feature. You could also use it to simulate a frame effect.

Frame Borders

You could write border on the photo.

PhotoController encapsulates all HacthBrush styles to write border, you can refer to MSDN on HacthStyle topic for more information.

Besides, we provides some other style borders. Like sawtooth, ball3d, honey comb etc. Even you could customize your border effect.

High Performance and Efficient

PhotoController has high performance. The code are all written in C# and all operation on the image are in memory. It's easy for you to use managed .NET object model.

PhotoController supports automatically garbage collection, but you need to dispose the object after you use it. The best usage is when you need the object, initialize it; after your work is done, release it. And you do not need to worry about if you release PhotoController, your Image object will be lost. PhotoController will clone the Image object and return it after you call a method. Even you release the Controller object, you won't lose the Image object