let user crop image in iOS - objective-c

Is there a built in function in objective-c to do image cropping like the one in iOS photo gallery? I have tried enabling editing in UIImagePickerController, but it doesn't do the same. Thanks!

there are quite a few ways to crop images using the Core Graphics functions, the most basic one would be:
CGRect cropRect = CGRectMake(0, 0, 100, 100);
CGImageRef cropped_img = CGImageCreateWithImageInRect(yourUIImage.CGImage, cropRect)

This is no built in function. The way to do it would be to take the image an get a frame around the portion of the image you want.
This question should help you

Related

Take a screenshot of an UIView where its subviews are camera sessions

I'm building an app where I need to take a screenshot of a view whose subviews are camera sessions (AVFoundation sessions). I've tried this code:
CGRect rect = [self.containerView bounds];
UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(rect.size,YES,0.0f);
CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
[self.containerView.layer renderInContext:context];
UIImage *capturedImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
Which effectively gets me an UIImage with the views, only that the camera sessions are black:
I've tried the private method UIGetScreenImage() and works perfectly, but as Apple doesn't allows this, I can't use it. I've also tried the one in Apple's docs but it's the same. I've tracked the problem to AVFoundation sessions using layers. How can I achieve this? The app has a container view with two views which are stopped camera sessions.
If using iOS 7, it's fairly simple and you could do something like this from a UIViewController:
UIView *snapshotView = [self.view snapshotViewAfterScreenUpdates:YES];
You can also use this link from a widow: iOS: what's the fastest, most performant way to make a screenshot programatically?
For iOS 6 and earlier, I could only find the following Apple Technical Q&A: [How do I take a screenshot of my app that contains both UIKit and Camera elements?]
Capture the contents of your camera view.
Draw that captured camera content yourself into the graphics context that you are rendering your UIKit elements. (Similar to what you did in your code)
I too am currently looking for a solution to this problem!
I am currently out at the moment so I can't test what I have found, but take a look at these links:
Screenshots-A Legal Way To Get Screenshots
seems like its on the right track - here is the
Example Project (and here is the initial post)
When I manage to get it to work I will definitely update this answer!

CIContext drawImage:inRect:fromRect: scaling

I am using CIContext method - (void)drawImage:(CIImage *)im inRect:(CGRect)dest fromRect:(CGRect)src to draw my image to screen. But I need to implement zoom-in/zoom-out method. How could I achieve it? I think zoom-in could be achieved increasing dest rect, because apple docs says:
The image is scaled to fill the destination rectangle.
But what about zoom-out? Because if dest rectangle is scaled down, then image is drawn in it's actual size, but only part of image is visible then (part that fits in dest rectangle).
What could you suggest?
You may try using this for image resizing (zooming). Hope this helps you.
Take a look at this little toy app I made
It's to demonstrate the NSImage version of your CIContext method:
- (void)drawInRect:(NSRect)dstRect
fromRect:(NSRect)srcRect
operation:(NSCompositingOperation)op
fraction:(CGFloat)delta
I did this to find out exactly how the rects relate to each other. It's interactive, you can play with the sliders and move/zoom the images. Not a solution, but it might help you work things out.
You can use CIFilter to resize your CIImage before drawing. Quartz Composer comes with a good example of using this filter. Just look up the description of the Image Resize filter in QC.
EDIT:
Another good filter for scaling is CILanczosScaleTransform. There is a snippet demonstrating basic usage.

iOS UIImageView scaling image down produces aliased image on iPad 2

I am using UIImageView to display thumbnails of images that can then be selected to be viewed at full size. The UIImageView has its content mode set to aspect fit.
The images are usually scaled down from around 500px x 500px to 100px x 100px. On the retina iPad they display really well while on the iPad2 they are badly aliased until the size gets closer to the native image size.
Examples:
Original Image
Retina iPad rendering at 100px x 100px
iPad 2 rendering at 100px x 100px
The difference between iPad 2 and new iPad might just be the screen resolution or could be that the GPU is better equipped to scale images. Either way, the iPad 2 rendering is very poor.
I have tried first reducing the image size by creating a new context, setting the interpolation quality to high and drawing the image into the context. In this case, the image looks fine on both iPads.
Before I continue down the image copy/resize avenue, I wanted to check there wasn't something simpler I was missing. I appreciate that UIImage isn't there to be scaled but I was under the impression UIImageView was there to handle scaling but at the moment it doesn't seem to be doing a good job scaling down. What (if anything) am I missing?
Update: Note: The drop shadow on the rendered / resized images is added in code. Disabling this made no difference to the quality of the scaling.
Another approach I've tried that does seem to be improving things is to set the minificationFilter:
[imageView.layer setMinificationFilter:kCAFilterTrilinear]
The quality is certainly improved and I haven't noticed a performance hit.
Applying a small minification filter bias can help out with this if you don't want to resample the image yourself:
imageView.layer.minificationFilter = kCAFilterTrilinear
imageView.layer.minificationFilterBias = 0.1
The left image has no filtering applied to it. The right image has a 0.1 filter bias.
Note that no explicit rasterization is required.
Playing around with very small values, you can usually come up with a value that smooths out the scaling artifacts just enough, and it's a lot easier than resizing the bitmap yourself. Certainly, you lose detail as the bias increases, so values even less than 0.1 are probably sufficient, though it all depends on the size the image view's frame that's displaying the image.
Just realize that trilinear filtering effectively enables mipmapping on the layer, which basically means it generates extra copies of the bitmap at progressively smaller scales. It's a very common technique used in rendering to increase render speed and also reduce scaling aliasing. The tradeoff is that it requires more memory, though the memory usage for successive downsampled bitmaps reduces exponentially.
Another potential advantage to this technique, though I have not tried it myself, is that you can animate minificationFilterBias. So if you're going to be scaling an image view down quite a lot as part of an animation, consider also animating the filter bias from 0.0 to whatever small value you've determined is appropriate for the scaled down size.
Finally, as others have noted, if your source image is very large, this technique isn't appropriate if overused, because Core Animation will always keep around the original bitmap. It's better to resize the image then discard the source image instead of using mipmapping in most cases, but for one-offs or cases where your image views are going to be deallocated quickly enough, this is fine.
if you just put the large image in a small imageview it will look real bad.
the solution is to properly resize the image... i'll add an example function that does the trick:
- (UIImage *)resizeImage:(UIImage*)image newSize:(CGSize)newSize {
CGRect newRect = CGRectIntegral(CGRectMake(0, 0, newSize.width, newSize.height));
CGImageRef imageRef = image.CGImage;
UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(newSize, NO, 0);
CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
CGContextSetInterpolationQuality(context, kCGInterpolationHigh);
CGAffineTransform flipVertical = CGAffineTransformMake(1, 0, 0, -1, 0, newSize.height);
CGContextConcatCTM(context, flipVertical);
CGContextDrawImage(context, newRect, imageRef);
CGImageRef newImageRef = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(context);
UIImage *newImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:newImageRef];
CGImageRelease(newImageRef);
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
return newImage;
}
this function might take some time .. so you might want to save the result to a cache file.
If you're not afraid of wasting memory and know what you're doing for a particular case, this works beautifully.
myView.layer.shouldRasterize = YES;
myView.layer.rasterizationScale = 2;
The resulting quality is much better than setMinificationFilter.
I am using images that are 256x256 and scaling them to something like 48 px. Obviously a saner solution here would be to downscale the images to the exact destination size.
Next helped to me:
imageView.layer.minificationFilter = kCAFilterTrilinear
imageView.layer.shouldRasterize = true
imageView.layer.rasterizationScale = UIScreen.mainScreen().scale
Keep an eye on performance if used in scroll lists.

Images in NSButton and NSImageView Blurred

I am completely stumped here; I have a series of small images I'm tinkering with and making into buttons:
And as you can see they are all decently crisp and sharp, and retain this when I open the png files in Preview and what not.
However, when I use them in NSButtons and NSImageViews in Interface Builder, setting Scaling to None:
The images become horribly blurred. What am I doing wrong? I don't know where to start and what to try; should I go back to the icons and try to make them pixel perfect? Does it have to do with anti-aliasing or something along those lines?
EDIT:
For some reason, it seems as if the NSButtons and NSImageViews are loading the high resolution versions of the images, even though I'm on a normal display, which can be identified by a slight light blue stroke I added to them. For some reason, Quartz Debug does not identify these as high resolution images and there's no red tint. Removing references to the #2x images does fix the problem... but...
If you check out session 245 in the WWDC 2012 videos Advanced Tips and Tricks for High Resolution on OS X in the first section on NSImage you'll find out why.
NSImage doesn't have any concept of high resolution - it just uses the smallest image that has more pixels than the space it has to fill - so if your NSImageView is bigger in dimension than your 1x image it will use the 2x image as it has more pixels.
I have this problem before. It seems that if your image's DPI isn't 72, the image size will be wrong. You can get the real size use the code below.
NSImage *image = [NSImage imageNamed:#"image"];
NSBitmapImageRep *rep = [NSBitmapImageRep imageRepWithData:[image TIFFRepresentation]];
NSSize size = NSMakeSize([rep pixelsWide], [rep pixelsHigh]);
[image setSize: size];
When specifying image names in Interface Builder and [NSImage imageNamed:], make sure to use foo instead of foo.png. While iOS is smart enough to add the #2x in the later case, Mac OS X is not. It will load the non-retina image in the later case, but will add the #2x in the first case (if such an image is present).
Are you assigning the images to your Buttons in IB or in Code?
If you are doing it in code, maybe creating a copy of the image (e.g. [myImage copy]), and assigning that copy to your button may solve this.
In my case (drawing icons in custom NSOutlineView), I had to make sure that the x,y origin of the drawRect is rounded to int values:
NSMakeRect( round(NSMinX(cellFrame)-iconSize.width),
round(NSMidY(cellFrame)-(iconSize.height/2.0f)), …);
This is actually a response to the earlier post about DPI, but I was unable to reply directly to it. The code in that post gave the true pixel dimensions for me (that is, it did not indicate any trouble). However, image DPI was definitely the culprit in my case. The symptoms I was seeing were:
With my NSImageViews set to No Scaling, the images would appear squashed.
With my NSImageViews set to Axes Independently, most images would appear correctly if the dimensions of the NSImageViews were set to exactly match the dimensions of the image.
However, even in this case, some images had strange artifacts in them that were not there when viewing the same image via Preview or elsewhere (or even via Interface Builder, for that matter -- they only appeared at runtime).
The images that had trouble were at a DPI other than 72. When I re-created the images at 72 DPI, all of the above behavior disappeared.
This was a pretty confounding issue -- I hope this helps someone!
For me, I just needed to set image scaling to none:
In Interface Builder
In code
NSImageCell *image;
[image setImageScaling:NSImageScaleNone];
NSButtonCell *button;
[button setImageScaling:NSImageScaleNone];

UIImage resizableImageWithCapInsets: not working as expected

I'm writing my first iOS app targeting the iOS 5.0+ platform. I'm using the UIAppearance protocol to customize the applications UI.
I'm trying to change the backgrounds for UIBarButtonItem across the entire application. Due to the fact that my UIBarButtonItem's may change size depending on the text or icon used I'm trying to utilize UIImage resizableImageWithCapInsets: with my background png.
I originally found the code I needed on Ray Wenderlich. Using the same exact code, with an image that's pretty close to the one used in the aforementioned tutorial, I'm getting weird results. Maybe it's just my inexperience with Cocoa Touch.
Here is the code I'm using.
DreamsAppDelegate.m - customizeAppearance:
UIImage *btnBg = [[UIImage imageNamed:#"navBarButton-bg"]
resizableImageWithCapInsets:UIEdgeInsetsMake(0, 6, 0, 6)];
[[UIBarButtonItem appearance] setBackgroundImage:btnBg
forState:UIControlStateNormal
barMetrics:UIBarMetricsDefault];
Here is the png background image I'm trying to use
And here is the result (in the simulator)
The section of your image between the left and right, and between the top and bottom, is tiled to fill the space needed by the image. Try UIEdgeInsetsMake(15, 6, 15, 6).
To generalize, if your image has a continuous gradient, the repeated section should only be 1 pixel high. Since your button image is 31 pixels high, the top and bottom (the first and third arguments to UIEdgeInsetsMake) should add to 30. They don't have to be equal; UIEdgeInsetsMake(8, 6, 22, 6) will move the repeated section up, resulting in a paler background.
Also, is the file you've attached the plain or the retina ('#2x') version of the image? The insets have to be within the size of the plain version.
I have the exact same problem.
Another thing you can do is to set the resizingMode of UIImageResizingModeStretch. It solved my problem.
Hopwever, it's not available in IOS5. So my solution would be to do as everyone else said. Realize that the tileable side should be just one pixel. Most buttons do not change much in the middle anyway.
So, use this code:
-(UIImage *) resizableImageWithCapInsets2: (UIEdgeInsets) inset
{
if ([self respondsToSelector:#selector(resizableImageWithCapInsets:resizingMode:)])
{
return [self resizableImageWithCapInsets:inset resizingMode:UIImageResizingModeStretch];
}
else
{
float left = (self.size.width-2)/2;//The middle points rarely vary anyway
float top = (self.size.height-2)/2;
return [self stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:left topCapHeight:top];
}
}