[Image-SIG] Please help !

[Matthew Nuzum]

On 8/2/05, Shi, Xuan <xshi at geo.wvu.edu> wrote:
> Please help me to figure out how to make such composite images. Currently, I
> have one png image with transparent background and want to overlay it on top
> of another image (jpeg). However, what I want to do is to make only
> transparent color as transparent on the composite image while keep all other
> non-transparent colors unchanged. In my approach, all colors in the png file
> are transparent. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. I am looking
> forward to hearing from you.

Hi Sam,

Its not real clear to me what you are trying to do, but it sounds
you're having a problem that I had at first. Without knowing exactly
what you're seeking (sending an example of code that doesn't quite
work may help illustrate what you're trying to do), I'll have to
guess.

You have a jpg, which is an RGB image and you have a png, which is an
RGBA image (it has alpha transparency). You're trying to composite the
RGBA image onto the RGB image. However, the entire RGBA image is
transparent, so you see only the RGB jpg.

My first attempt at RGBA resulted in opposite pixels being
transparent. I'd guess that if you loaded an image as RGB when you
meant it to be RGBA, and then got your transparency backwards you'd
get something like you described. Of course, this is pure conjecture.

Here is some code that just creates a rectangle and puts a drop shadow
behind it. This is kind of old, and was my first attempt at using
transparency. It was actually the foundation for a much more complex
program, which is why it may be a little overly complex to achieve its
goal. (Although I would like to know how to get guassian blur - I had
to use two blurs to get what I considered adequate) Notice the line,
"c = ImageChops.invert(c)" which inverts the alpha channel before
using putalpha().

#!/usr/bin/python
import Image
import ImageFilter
import ImageChops
import sys

width = 400
height = 300
save_name = "trans_test.gif"

# a little time saver from:
# http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/266466
def HTMLColorToRGB(colorstring):
    """ convert #RRGGBB to an (R, G, B) tuple """
    colorstring = colorstring.strip()
    if colorstring[0] == '#': colorstring = colorstring[1:]
    if len(colorstring) != 6:
        raise ValueError, "input #%s is not in #RRGGBB format" % colorstring
    r, g, b = colorstring[:2], colorstring[2:4], colorstring[4:]
    r, g, b = [int(n, 16) for n in (r, g, b)]
    return (r, g, b)

color = "#FF0000"
shadow_color = HTMLColorToRGB(color)
white = HTMLColorToRGB("#FFFFFF")
black = HTMLColorToRGB("#000000")
new = Image.new("RGB", (width+20, height+20), white)
new.paste(shadow_color, (8,8,width+12,height+12))
tmp = new.filter(ImageFilter.BLUR)
new = tmp.filter(ImageFilter.BLUR)

new = new.convert("RGBA")

c = new.convert("L")
c = ImageChops.invert(c)
bands = c.split()

new.putalpha(bands[0])
new.show()
new.save(save_name)
#end

I'm no guru, so any critique is welcome. Also, Sam, don't get the
impression that I'm extremely knowledgable about this stuff, I'm a
major newbie.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org