Color overlaying algorithm - iphone

I'm looking for an algorithm to overlay a color on top of existing picture. Something similar to the following app (wall painter): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wall-painter/id396799182?mt=8
I want a similar functionality so I can paint walls in an existing picture and change them to a different color.
I can work both in yuv or rgb mode.

To successfully paint the walls in a picture, you have to do two steps:
Find the boundary of the wall within the picture (select the part of the image to be colored)
Apply the desired color to the selected area
The first step is the hard part. It similar to what Photoshop's magic wand tool would do. And indeed a search for magic wand algorithm turns up a few good articles such as this article with Objective-C code.
The second step is much easier and can be achieve with CGContextSetBlendMode and CGContextDrawImage.

You could try drawing into a graphics context with kCGBlendModeColor. From the documentation:
Uses the luminance values of the background with the hue and saturation values of the source image. This mode preserves the gray levels in the image. You can use this mode to color monochrome images or to tint color images.
Experimenting with other blend modes might also do the trick. See the documentation for details (search for "kCGBlendMode").

The RGB and YUV color models are not really great for changing colors in this way. I think the best color model for this is HLS.
Link: RGB to HLS and HLS to RGB conversion source code
H (hue) will change the base color
L (luminance) will change the brightness
S (saturation) will change the amount of color
You can evaluate the effect of these three components in a photo editing app, like Photoshop of The GIMP.

Related

How to merge an image to fill in other image with shape?

I want to merge an image to another image in one shape. Example:
1- People image
2- Shape Image:
So how to do draw that. I already implement for merging but it's not fill to that shape.
It's possible to do this using the masking functions in the Quartz 2D framework. It's a little bit more involved than using the higher level image functions of UI Kit, but Quartz 2D gives you a lot more power to do cool graphics techniques.
The relevant Apple Developer guide to this can be found here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_images/dq_images.html
For this example, you'd want to create a mask shape for the inside part of the shape image. There are two ways you can do this. One way is to use image editing software to create a second mask image, with the same size as your shape image, with pure black in the area where you want the people image to appear, and white where you don't want to appear. In this example, that would be the area inside the blue shape. It is important to not crop this image, or else they won't match up exactly.
The other way to create the masking image would be to do that dynamically based on the shape image, and honestly, this is the way I would do it. This would mean that you're including fewer images in your app, and if you made any changes to the shape image, you wouldn't have to recreate the mask image as well. You could do this by making a small change to the way your shape image is formatted. You would need to use a format that allows transparency - png is preferred - so that there is alpha transparency in the part of the image outside of the shape, which is white in your JPEG image. Make sure the section in the center of the image is white (really, any color that is NOT USED in the wanted part of the shape image would work, but I'll say white for this example) and that you don't have parts of it that aren't pure white after image compression.
You will then use Quartz to select the area that's white, and create a mask from that. This technique is a bit more involved, but what you need can be found in the document I linked to above. Because of this, you might start with a static masking image, and then convert to the more involved technique after you've got the code to make the first technique work.
When you have your masking image, you would create the mask itself with the function CGImageMaskCreate(::::::::). You can then apply the mask to the people image using the function CGImageCreateWithMask(::), which will give you an image with the person's portrait, with the correct shape cropped from the center.
Finally, you would display this in your app by placing the masked people image on top of the shape image, and voila, you'll have what you're looking for.
Also, keep in mind, when using the Quartz 2D framework, you'll have to make sure you release images when they are no longer needed, or else you could have memory leaks.

How to create an art asset that can be dynamically colored in software?

I asked this question on the Graphic Design site, but it includes a programming component that might be better answered here.
Specifically, I have a bunch of photographic crayon images. I would like to remove the color from one to produce a neutral image that I can load into an iPhone app that I'm writing and dynamically color. The crayon images have dark regions (shadows) and light regions (shine) which I would like to preserve. I will be dynamically coloring it with many different colors, ranging from white to rainbow colors to black.
My first inclination is to turn the image into a grayscale image and then somehow turn the color channel into an alpha channel, and change the color of all pixels to black. Then I could use it as a mask. However, this would only preserve the shadows, and I would lose all the highlights.
Any ideas?
Two options come to mind:
Make a grayscale version that could be tinted as you said, with the shadows and highlights simply white and gray.
Make an outline, i.e. an image with alpha that had 0% opacity in the colored parts, say 10% white over the highlights, 10% black on the shadows, and 100% black/dark gray for the lines/edges. The idea being that you could put any color under the outline and it would look right.

Mapping CoreGraphics Blend Modes to Porter-Duff

I have an iPhone app that does image manipulation via blending two UIImage objects via CoreGraphics, specifically CGContextSetBlendMode. I am currently researching porting it to Android. I've gone through the process of combining to Bitmap objects on Android using PorterDuff modes. However, I want much more complicate compositing. For example, I'm using kCGBlendModeHardLight for many blends:
Either multiplies or screens colors,
depending on the source image sample
color. If the source image sample
color is lighter than 50% gray, the
background is lightened, similar to
screening. If the source image sample
color is darker than 50% gray, the
background is darkened, similar to
multiplying. If the source image
sample color is equal to 50% gray, the
source image is not changed. Image
samples that are equal to pure black
or pure white result in pure black or
white. The overall effect is similar
to what you’d achieve by shining a
harsh spotlight on the source image.
Use this to add highlights to a scene.
But don't know of anyway (if it's even possible) to emulate this via Porter-Duff. Does Android not support better Image Manipulation algorithms out of the box? Is it possible to use Porter-Duff in some way to emulate more advanced blend modes?
In addition to the 12 Porter-Duff blending equations, Android supports Lighten, Darken, Multiply, Screen and soon Overlay. Unfortunately this means HardLight is not available and you would have to implement it yourself.

Convert an image to an iPhone toolbar icon

I have a grayscale icon that I'm editing with Photoshop with a transparent background, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to convert the icon to one that can be used as an iPhone toolbar icon. If I simply save the image as a PNG, it doesn't show up as anti-aliased on the iPhone because every pixel with color is being rendered as black, instead of a shade of gray.
According to the Apple docs and other sources, there needs to be an alpha channel on the image to specify varying levels of transparency for each pixel. However, I have no idea what that means. I've read these posts and docs from Adobe and I still can't figure out how to properly convert a grayscale image into one that can be used as an iPhone toolbar icon. The blog post is hard to comprehend and poorly written, and the Adobe docs don't really help.
http://cahit.hayalet.net/blog/514/converting-an-image-to-iphone-toolbar-icon/
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/help.html?content=WS74B356C9-353F-4483-8632-7B1A102F2A2E.html
Can someone point me in the right direction or provide exact, step-by-step directions to doing this in Photoshop?
It's much more simple than having to muck with actual masks in Photoshop.
iPhone toolbar icons are about 30px by 30px, so make a new Photoshop file with those dimensions. Ensure the background is transparent (you can specify that when creating a new file).
Then, any pixels you draw on top of this transparency become what iOS uses for the icon. Doesn't matter what color it is in Photoshop for NSToolbar icons -- they're automatically used as masks by iOS.
Leave transparent the parts you want to show through. Save as 24-bit PNG, and chuck into XCode as usual.
For a few icons that serve as good starting examples, check out the ones I publish for free here: http://glyphish.com Just take one of the PNGs and open it in Photoshop and you'll see that it's drawn in an arbitrary color (#444444) with varying levels of opacity to create darker and lighter parts of the icon.
This is more of a photoshop question than coding but anyway, here's a suggestion.
Lunacore has a good tutorial on how to use masks.
What you want to do is:
Make sure you're background is transparent.
Create a new layer and
fill it with any solid color.
Create a mask on the solid color
layer, and fill your greyscale image into the mask. (Use your
greyscale image as the mask.)
Toolbar icons use your image as a mask. They only consider what transparancy the image has. Not what color or shade.

Coloring Image in iPhone SDK

i am developing a iphone app. i have a background image lets say an airplane with black color out lines and from color palette user can pick a color and fill the region of airplane....any help, code , suggestion will highly be appriciated
A simple fill algorithm should do. just expand from the point you are on until you meet region end pixels
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill you can also try googling for Boundary Fill algorithm
My first though was to have a UIView and a mask image on top of that with the plane but this only works in certain situations. If the shape of the plane does not change you could also change the color and then "fill" the plan in during the drawRect using functions like CGContextAddArc and CGContextAddRect.