Accessing raw image data with Snow Leopard

Question

I develop with XCode 3.2 under Snow Leopard, and I want to read a jpg-file from disk into memory and manipulate directly with the raw image bitmap presented as a C char array. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Take a look at this http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSBitmapImageRep The trick is to get an NSBitmapImageRep from an NSImage. You can then access the underlying pixel data.

Please note that while this can be useful and fun, if you wanted to develop a sophisticated image filtering thing you would be better off with opengl, Core image or even quartz composer. Apple has a lot of sample code for all of these routes on http://developer.apple.com/