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The Core Graphics framework is written in pure C, meaning that it’s impossible to use CGImage instances directly with UIKit. Apple created UIImage as an Objective-C wrapper class around CGImage to bridge the gap. We explore Core Image in this article.
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At their core, images consist of colored pixels. Depending on the color space, they might have different numbers of “channels,” most commonly red, green, blue, and alpha. Usually one byte is used per channel. The size in bytes for such a bitmapped image is calculated as width x height x bytes_per_channel x number_of_channels.
Core Graphics—a.k.a. Quartz—represents such bitmapped images as CGImage instances. The Core Graphics framework is written in pure C, meaning that it’s impossible to use CGImage instances directly with UIKit. Apple created UIImage as an Objective-C wrapper class around CGImage to bridge the gap. UIImage instances usually carry a CGImage in their belly that contains the actual image data.
Figure 1 Finished QR Code Builder app with printed output
When manipulating images in UIKit or Quartz, you never get the benefit of the GPU. That’s why Apple created Core Image as a framework for manipulating images in real time with the full benefit of hardware acceleration by the graphics processor.
In Core Image you don’t deal with individual pixels but rather with manipulation steps. Each such step, represented by a CIFilter, is a recipe for manipulating images represented by CIImage instances. If you chain multiple manipulation steps, Core Image compiles those down to a single GPU program, called a shader. When you request the final output of such a filter chain, the initial input is loaded on the GPU, the compiled shader is run, and you receive the resulting output. Figure 5.4 shows a CGImage being turned into a CIImage, the chained filters doing their work on that, and a new CGImage being created via a CIContext.
CIImage instances can be created from a wide variety of sources. Static images will usually come from CGImage instances. You can also pass CVPixelBuffer instances if you want to handle live video coming from an AVCaptureDevice.
Most Core Image filters have an inputImage parameter for supplying the source image. One category of Core Image filters—the so-called generators—don’t, because they themselves are able to generate images. Generators can serve as input for other filters,
Figure 2 Core Image filter chain
or you can simply poll their output. For example, you can use CIConstantColorGenerator for creating images consisting of a single solid color or CICheckerboardGenerator for creating an image with a checkerboard pattern.
Let’s try out a simple Core Image generator by creating an 8 x 8 checkerboard suitable for display with a UIImageView. Note the use of CIColor for specifying colors and CIVector for specifying an x-y offset. Those are the typical immutable parameter objects used by Core Image. Values are specified as NSNumber objects:
Generators output CIImage instances via their outputImage method. To use one with UIKit, you need to render it into a CGImage by means of a CIContext. As you can see in the preceding example, Core Image doesn’t have any knowledge of the device’s content scale, which would be 2 for Retina displays. Because of this, you need to double the size of the generated image and then specify this scale in the method that makes a UIImage out of the CGImage.
This should give you enough information about the general workings of Core Image generators.
My book currently available at a discount via the promo code mentioned on DZone.
Categories: Recipes
