Erik Brown

A good picture may say a thousand words, but in the world of digital imaging, a thousand pixels does not a good picture make. When you happen to have a good digital picture, it is important to understand some underlying truths about digital image processing before you manipulate and alter the image. As we'll see, even the simple act of rotating a picture can muck up the quality of the underlying image file. This article introduces some basic concepts and techniques used in image processing, and introduces some of the image-processing operations provided by the .NET Framework. I will discuss images and bitmaps, the notion of an image codec, and take a closer look at the JPEG image codec supported by the .NET Framework. Images in .NET As you may know, Microsoft provides the graphical device interface, or GDI+, to support graphics programming within Windows operating s... (more)

Customizing the PictureBox Control

The Windows Forms namespace in .NET includes a number of classes for building Windows-based applications. One such class is the PictureBox control, which displays an image within a control window. This article shows how to extend the PictureBox control in a custom PhotoBox control that can preserve the aspect ratio of a displayed image, and discusses how to use this control in the Windows Forms Designer window of Visual Studio .NET. Figure 1 shows a photograph in a standard PictureBox control with the SizeMode property of StretchImage. This setting stretches and distorts the ima... (more)