After many cases of trial and error, I have concluded that the only solution to a problem of mine is to find an image library which supports a certain format of JPEG images. This particular format is of Adobe and Delphi cannot seem to recognize it properly (it always comes out blue). Otherwise, the image does properly show in most other applications (windows picture viewer, ms word, paint, photoshop, etc.). Just when loaded into Delphi, the TJpegImage mis-interprets it and turns the image blue.
I have already tried TWICImage which was very close to a solution, but when using TWICImage in Windows XP, the blue image problem persists.
So now, I am looking for a library which…
- Properly supports this not-so-standard JPEG format of Adobe
- is Free and full open-source for at least Delphi XE2
- is as easy to use as the current VCL graphics in Delphi (based on
TGraphic)
…and would be very nice if it could…
- have built-in capabilities of automatically saving thumbnails (in some form of cache)
- This is for performance – we maintain 400×400 thumbnails to correspond with all originals. If a thumbnail exists, this is loaded in most cases instead of original.
- have built-in capabilities for basic manipulation, such as rotation and background erasing
Again, the most important thing is to properly support this Adobe format of JPEG images. Refer to my previous question. And please keep in mind that we do not want something that can do 100 times more capabilities than we need (such as layering, special fx, etc.) The only reason I need this library in the first place is to fix a very peculiar problem which has become wide-spread for our customer base.
NativeJpg, by SimDesign satisfies the at least the first three criteria, and does support lossless 90° rotations. Your test image shows correctly (brown) when laoded using it, and it supports quite a few other color spaces besides the Adobe one. Some images can be slightly different colors than Photoshop, and according to the author that’s due to ambiguities in the spec; Opera and various other image viewers decode them the same way.
Most of the JPEG properties and support are exposed through its own class structures, but there is a TGraphic descendant as well. It’s 100% Delphi. It was previously commercial, but it’s open source now, with a BSD license, and an option to purchase support and access to beta releases.
The current version (1.32) is available in the forums.