Question

I’m thinking about the best way to do two things in Java:

1. merge two images, the background one in .PNG and the other in .GIF or .PNG (has transparency and is to overlap the first one);
2. convert the merged image to .GIF (with transparency).

I don’t want to render them, just to handle the images in the java class and write the resultant image to a file.

Can anyone help me? What’s the best way to do this?
Thank you!

EDIT:
Thank you all for the suggestions!
This was what I ended up using! Pretty simple!

BufferedImage background = ImageIO.read(new File("image.jpg"));
WritableRaster raster = background.getRaster();
BufferedImage layer = ImageIO.read(new File("overlay.png"));
Graphics2D g2d = (Graphics2D)background.getGraphics();
g2d.drawImage(layer,72,80,null);

About the second problem, I still can’t save this with .gif extension with transparency.
This

ImageIO.write(bufferedImage,"gif",file);

creates the .gif image file but it loses the transparency!
Does anyone know how can I do this? JAI also doesn’t have the gif encoder.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Not sure of your application, but if this is server-based high performance stuff, I’ve had much better results shelling out to ImageMagick than using Java’s image libraries.