Question

I’m trying to figure out whether an image is colored or not. On this StackOverflow question, there’s a reply that says that I should check the PixelFormat enum of the Image. Unfortunately, the reply isn’t very clear to me. Is it safe to check whether the image.PixelFormat is different from PixelFormat.Format16bppGrayScale to consider that it is a colored image? What about the other values of the enumeration? The MSDN documentation isn’t very clear…

Answer 1

You can improve this by avoiding Color.FromArgb, and iterating over bytes instead of ints, but I thought this would be more readable for you, and easier to understand as an approach.

The general idea is draw the image into a bitmap of known format (32bpp ARGB),
and then check whether that bitmap contains any colors.

Locking the bitmap’s bits allows you to iterate through it’s color-data many times faster than using GetPixel, using unsafe code.

If a pixel’s alpha is 0, then it is obviously GrayScale, because alpha 0 means it’s completely opaque. Other than that – if R = G = B, then it is gray (and if they = 255, it is black).

private static unsafe bool IsGrayScale(Image image)
{
    using (var bmp = new Bitmap(image.Width, image.Height, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb))
    {
        using (var g = Graphics.FromImage(bmp))
        {
            g.DrawImage(image, 0, 0);
        }

        var data = bmp.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, bmp.Width, bmp.Height), ImageLockMode.ReadOnly, bmp.PixelFormat);

        var pt = (int*)data.Scan0;
        var res = true;

        for (var i = 0; i < data.Height * data.Width; i++)
        {
            var color = Color.FromArgb(pt[i]);

            if (color.A != 0 && (color.R != color.G || color.G != color.B))
            {
                res = false;
                break;
            }
        }

        bmp.UnlockBits(data);

        return res;
    }
}