Read and write access to PNG image files using the LodePNG library. The package has no external dependencies.
The loder
package provides functions for easily reading from PNG image files and writing to them. It functions in a very similar way to Simon Urbanek's venerable png
package, but unlike that package it does not require external libpng
and zlib
libraries to be installed. Instead, loder
includes Lode Vandevenne's compact LodePNG library, which provides self-contained PNG read and write functionality.
The package may be installed from CRAN using the standard command
install.packages("loder")
Alternatively, the latest development version can be installed directly from GitHub using the devtools
package, viz.
## install.packages("devtools")devtools::install_github("jonclayden/loder")
The readPng
function is used to read PNG images. It returns an array of class loder
with three dimensions representing rows, columns and channels. Greyscale images have one channel, grey/alpha images have two, red/green/blue (RGB) images have three, and red/green/blue/alpha images have four.
library(loder)path <- system.file("extdata", "pngsuite", "basn6a08.png", package="loder")image <- readPng(path)dim(image)# [1] 32 32 4
Metadata including background colour, aspect ratio and pixel size or image resolution are available through attributes, if they are stored in the file.
path <- system.file("extdata", "pngsuite", "cdfn2c08.png", package="loder")attributes(readPng(path))# $dim# [1] 32 8 3# # $class# [1] "loder" "array"# # $range# [1] 0 255# # $asp# [1] 4
The display
function from the mmand
package respects these attributes, and can be used to view the image on an R graphics device.
## install.packages("mmand")mmand::display(image)
Metadata alone may be read using the inspectPng
function, which also gives information about the compression level achieved:
inspectPng(path)# PNG file: [...]/loder/extdata/pngsuite/cdfn2c08.png# - 32 x 8 pixels, RGB# - 8 bpp (uncompressed data size 768 B; file size is 404 B)# - Aspect ratio is 4 : 1
Image data can be written back to a file using the writePng
function. The theoretical numerical range of the pixel intensities (i.e., the black and white points) can be set using the range
attribute or an argument of the same name.
writePng(image, tempfile(), range=c(0,200))
This will rescale the image intensities, and clip any values outside the specified range to the appropriate extreme.
This file documents the significant user-visible changes in each release of the loder
R package.
inspectPng
function can be used to obtain details of a PNG file without obtaining the pixel data.print
method for objects of class "loder".writePng
function now supports writing interlaced files, and offers different compression levels.readPng
and writePng
are now passed through path.expand
, so that paths containing a tilde (~
) will be handled properly.