Like people, images are all different. Even though some images may look the same, there can be hidden information within the properties that make them unique. Perhaps you find yourself currently in a workspace that is going paperless and need a way to convert image files to the same format, size, or bits-per-pixel. You'll first need to be able to quickly check the various image properties to see which ones already match your needs and which ones don't.

LEADTOOLS offers developers an easy way to extract this image information with the CodecsImageInfo Class. This class provides methods to get information about images. There are hundreds of different image properties that can obtained with this class.

I recently became intrigued by some art work I saw online. It is a bunch of Rubik's cubes set up to reproduce a picture.

The artists are essentially reducing the image's colors down to a palette of six colors with dithering. By dithering the picture, it appears to look like the subject from a distance because the colors mix and merge to resemble the original colors. But the closer you get to the piece, the more it appears to be a bunch of randomly ordered colored squares. It sparked the artist in me, so I decided to use LEADTOOLS to help me come up with my own Rubik's Cubism-like art.

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Introduction

This post describes how to use LEADTOOLS (Windows or Linux) in .NET Core to convert almost any image to a PNG. This service can be used to display non-standard files in any modern web browser without installing plug-ins or third party code on the client.

Background

If you follow this tutorial, the resulting project demonstrates a quick and easy way to use 3rd party C API in .NET Core using DLLImport. Specifically, this project uses LEADTOOLS DLL/SO C API in .NET Core to convert files to PNG. Native .NET Core support is not available now available in LEADTOOLS version 20. An updated blog post that uses NuGet packages has been published for version 20.

Within the past half year, LEADTOOLS has had some major releases with the SDK and the Cloud Services. Today, we are going to talk about both the Xamarin Camera Control as well as the Merge Web API. We will be using the Xamarin Camera Control to take multiple pictures and then send those image to LEAD's cloud services. Once those have been uploaded, the Merge Web API will merge all those images into one single file.

UPDATE

While most features in LEADTOOLS are backwards-compatible and older how-tos still apply in newer versions, the features discussed in this post have changed significantly in Version 20. Please refer to the following forum post for an updated version of this tutorial:

https://www.leadtools.com/support/forum/posts/t12633-HOW-TO--Enable-HTTPS-in-the-LEADTOOLS-Web-Scanning-Host