The Java Image Processing Survival Guide

For a few customers I needed to do a lot of things with images

• Process million of images - many of them were user-supplied
• Convert various image formats (JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP) into JPEGs
• Converting PDFs into JPEGs
• Resample images
• Handle CMYK image
• Handle images with alpha-channel
• Apply image operations such as geyscaling, dithering and sharpening
• Setting image compression and DPI for storing JPGs

In order to get the things done I used various image processing libraries with varying success

• Java ImageIO (comes with the JDK)
• Java Advanced Imaging (JAI)
• Apache Commons Imaging (also known as Sanselan)
• TwelveMonkeys library

The problem with all of those libraries is that I had various issues and information how to solve my issues were hard to find on the internet.

Therefore the idea was born to write a paper & sample code covering the image processing libraries I used - maybe you can save a lot of time :-)