Question

I’m trying to remove all white or transparent pixels from an image, leaving the actual image (cropped). I’ve tried a few solutions, but none seem to work. Any suggestions or am I going to spend the night writing image cropping code?

Answer 1

public Bitmap CropBitmap(Bitmap original)
{
    // determine new left
    int newLeft = -1;
    for (int x = 0; x < original.Width; x++)
    {
        for (int y = 0; y < original.Height; y++)
        {
            Color color = original.GetPixel(x, y);
            if ((color.R != 255) || (color.G != 255) || (color.B != 255) || 
                (color.A != 0))
            {
                // this pixel is either not white or not fully transparent
                newLeft = x;
                break;
            }
        }
        if (newLeft != -1)
        {
            break;
        }

        // repeat logic for new right, top and bottom

    }

    Bitmap ret = new Bitmap(newRight - newLeft, newTop - newBottom);
    using (Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(ret)
    {
        // copy from the original onto the new, using the new coordinates as
        // source coordinates for the original
        g.DrawImage(...);
    }

    return ret
}

Note that this function will be slow as dirt. GetPixel() is unbelievably slow, and accessing the Width and Height properties of a Bitmap inside a loop is also slow. LockBits would be the proper way to do this – there are tons of examples here on StackOverflow.