Converting PNG file to bitmap array in Python

Question

I would like to convert a PNG image to a 2 dimensional array where each array holds a list of the RGB values of that specific pixel. How could one create a program to read-in a *.png file and convert to this type of data structure?

Answer 1

If you have PIL installed then you can create an image with Image.open and get the colors like so:

data = [image.getpixel((x, y)) for x in range(image.width) for y in range(image.height)]

Answer 2

You can use the existing pygame module. Import a file into a Surface using pygame.image.load. You can then access the bit array from this using pygame.surfarray.array2d. Please see the Pygame docs for more information.

Answer 3

You can use wand for such basic tasks. The syntax is very easy to read unlike other ImageMagik libs. Basically you'd do something like:

from wand.image import Image
from wand.display import display

array = []
with Image(filename='yourfile.png') as img:
    array.append(img.channel_images)        # this is most likely wrong, but it should be something similar

It will be along those lines. Once I leave the office I will try this out.