When you are creating an ASP.NET imaging application and need to provide the user an image browser or editor, Graphics Mill may be extremely helpful. It provides industry-standard AJAX web controls that enable you to create a web image editor as easily as in a Windows application. These controls are very fast and optimized specifically for web imaging.
AJAX Viewport Control for ASP.NET
The powerful scrollable image viewer web control implements a smart AJAX-based load-by-demand scheme when displaying images, i.e.:
- Only the visible part of the image is cropped and downloaded;
- If some part of image has already been downloaded, it is cached at the client. When the user scrolls to this part, it is displayed immediately;
- If some portion of the image displayed at the viewport has already been cached, only the absent part of image is downloaded;
- While a portion of image is being downloaded to the viewport, low-quality version is displayed (see the screenshot). This makes the image easier to navigate;
This control enables the user to not only scroll the image, but also zoom it. The following zooming features are available:
- Manual zooming (by mouse wheel or modifying appropriate property of the control);
- Automatic zooming including such modes as "fit to page" (fit entire image in the control), "fit to width" (fit the image in the control width), etc;
- Several quality modes for zoom in/out display. Supports scale-to-gray resize technique for bitone images (makes such images look smooth and prevents the text from being unreadable);
It also supports the rubber-band rectangular selection which can be either free-hand, or have fixed proportions. You can "shade" the portion of the image outside of the selection. It is useful when you use the selection for cropping.
Also, you can draw text and shapes directly on the canvas in web browser. You can apply fills to the shapes and draw text in different colors as well as change font type, size and weight.
A special navigator control can be associated with the image viewer. Navigator controls specify behavior of the mouse events at the viewer - pan, zoom in/out, zoom in the selected rectangle. Custom behavior can be specified.
The control is compatible with most modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and above, Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, etc.
Remote Scripting — Edit Image without Roundtrips
Graphics Mill implements a remote scripting mechanism which enables you to run server code from JavaScript without roundtrips (also known as AJAX). It allows you to create highly interactive web image editors. Features include:
- Possibility to apply transforms to images directly from JavaScript. It will automatically call proper server code and update the image without roundtrip;
- Extendable architecture: you can add your own remote scripting methods to apply some specific modifications (e.g. draw a border or add some text);
- Possibility to disable unnecessary methods on the server side to increase the security;
- Possibility to access/change control properties through the client-side JavaScript.
Examples of Usage
Using Graphics Mill web controls you can build applications such as:
- Online photo editor:
- Web TIFF viewer:
- Online business card editor:
- Red-eye effect removal tool:
- ...and any other imaging web application.
Photo Editor Application
There is a photo editing web application based on Graphics Mill available, called Photo Editor. It enables you to build in your website a powerful photo editor allowing you to crop, rotate, add borders, adjust brightness/contrast, etc. The good news is that each Graphics Mill customer can use it at no extra fee!
Learn more about Aurigma Photo Editor
Source Code Available!
The source code for the Web controls is available upon purchase. The code is written in C#.
Note, the source code for the core class library is sold separately.