When you are creating an ASP.NET imaging application, and need do provide the user an image browser or editor, Graphics Mill for .NET™ may be extremely helpful. It provides industry-standard AJAX web controls which enable you to create a web image editor as easily as in a Windows application. These controls are extremely fast and optimized specifically for web imaging.
Web-optimized Viewport Control
The powerful scrollable image viewer web control implements 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 techinque 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.
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 the most modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 and above, Mozilla, Netscape.
Remote Scripting - Edit Image Without Roundtrips
Graphics Mill for .NET™ 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.
- 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 web controls of the Graphics Mill for .NET™ you can build such applications as:
- Online photo editor:
- Web TIFF viewer:
- Online business card editor:
- Red-eye effect removal tool:
- ...and any other imaging web application.
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.