Results for tag: image
I am on a mission to create an amazing HTML5 image editor and want to write a little about zoom, crop, and drag or pan. These are 3 features with a lot of overlap, depending on the design choice and implementation, so I would like to first consider the user experience. Panning or dragging the image, or a selection of the image, is going to be a clear need that is shared by both zoom and crop. If I click on an image and drag, am I moving the image or selecting an area to crop? One way to fix this dilemma is to only allow one of these operations at a time, but that requires extra user clicks. An alternative is to drop a special “crop selection area” on the image at all times and allow resize or drag of that element while dragging outside of that area moves the image. What is the best user experience?
Zoom could be implemented with plus or minus buttons that change the scale of an image or a canvas object. I have also seen dropdowns that let you set a zoom level in percentages but both of these implementation require extra unnecessary clicks. They also require shifting the mouse between clicking and dragging of the image, so the act of zooming in and out seems to have a better user experience with a mousewheel implementation. Cropping an image, in my opinion, should also work using a mouse selection and personally, I would vote for enable/disable action instead of keeping a persistent selection area on the image at all times. So, you can use zoom at all times but cropping an image requires selecting the crop tool. Finally, how do you zoom to a mouse cursor and does the zoom actually change image data via html5 CANVAS or should it just manipulate the CSS transform property and if so, how would the CSS change affect cropping?
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How do you make a video programmatically? Sending images to a server side program like FFmpeg is one option but how do you make a video from images in HTML5, all on the client side? In the past, I have converted html5 canvas frames into an animated GIF and now I am looking to do something similar but finish with a video file. You need a video encoder and today I just happened to stumble on Whammy, a real time JavaScript WebM Encoder. It even comes with a demo which shows how CANVAS frames are encoded into a webm video file. So, today, I am going to create an online video creator that lets you upload some images which get converter into a picture slideshow in video format.
Here is the Online Image Slideshow to Video Converter
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SVG is awesome but sometimes you want to convert it into an image format like a JPG or PNG. If you created some chart or graph with D3.js, you might want to offer the option of saving that graph in an image format. Looking around, I landed on this Save SVG as PNG article and while it provides a good solutions to the problem, I wanted to expand on it and provide some other options. First of all, I want to go through an example where you are creating something in D3 and then want to make this conversion using a button and a JavaScript function. I think you could provide 3 types of image files: an SVG converted to a dataurl and inserted into an image tag (this is still technically SVG), a SVG converted into a PNG using HTML5 CANVAS and inserting that base64 data into an IMG tag, and finally, converting the SVG into a PNG binary data and loading that into a blob url so that you can provide an actual filename inside of an IMG tag.
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Do you remember ColorAPI? What happened to it? Well, it got me thinking about creating my own color scheme generator from a online photos using HTML5 CANVAS and JavaScript. A little research landed me on Andrey Okonetchnikov’s Colorist. I glanced at the code (I put it on JSFiddle if you want to take a look) and realized that the script does calculations around average color of different slices of the dropped image. I like this approach, it is fast, but I wish that I could limit the amount of colors on the palette to a certain number.
This script does not do that because when colors from different slices are similar, the getAverageColor function combines them to make a new color, so the amount of colors you get on your palette depends on the image. This is important because we don’t want to have very similar colors on the palette. However, we do want to limit the amount of colors, so how can this be done?
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I have been recently reading about Image Scaling and Pixelation and wanted to create a simple HTML5 image resizer. It turns out that someone beat me to it as I found JS-Image-Resizer on GitHub and it even implements HTML5 Web Workers. It features a two-pass resizing algorithm and I think it looks pretty good, but I still wanted to share some research I have done into image scaling with JavaScript.
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