Graphics Mill for .NET consists of three parts:
- Core class library - a set of classes (non-visual) that provide imaging operations: loading/saving images from/to files, applying different transforms and effects, converting pixels between different color spaces, drawing lines, curves, shapes and text, etc. More about Graphics Mill for .NET core class library...
- Windows Forms controls - a set of Windows controls which leverage using Graphics Mill for .NET in desktop Windows applications. These controls enable you to display an image, zoom it, pan, select a portion of an image, as well as print it. Also, it includes controls which allows to handle multiple images and vector objects within one work area (move, resize, rotate, etc). More about Graphics Mill for .NET Windows Forms controls...
- Web Forms controls - a set of unique web controls that provides to user great GUI for image displaying and editing. Using these controls you can easily build web photo editors and build other kind of imaging web applications. More about Graphics Mill for .NET Web Forms controls...
Also, these are additional modules (add-ons) for Graphics Mill for .NET are available:
- Advanced PSD Add-on - a set of classes that allows to read with PSD files (native format of Adobe Photoshop ). You can load separate raster and text layers. For text layers you can read font and paragraph settings. This add-on is ideal to create an application which can work with image templates (like business cards, postcard, flyers, etc). More about Advanced PSD Add-on .
- Red-Eye Removal Add-on - a transform class that allows to add red-eye removal functionality to your application. It supports two modes: manual and semiautomatic. More about Red-Eye Removal Add-on .
- AVI Processor Add-on - a set of classes that expands Graphics Mill for .NET functionality with AVI files support. You can read AVI files frame-by-frame, create new AVI files, work with audio track, and perform a lot of other video processing operations. More about AVI Processor Add-on .
- Media Processor Add-on - a set of classes that enables you to load frames from various video files. Unlike AVI Processor Add-on, it cannot create video files, however it supports not only AVI vido format, but also other video formats (like MPEG, MOV, ASF, WMV, etc - it depends on DirectX and QuickTime version installed at your machine). More about Media Processor Add-on .
Features Highlights for Different Fields
Graphics Mill is a very versatile component and it can be used in a wide variety of applications. To help you to examine benefits of the Graphics Mill for your kind of applications, we have prepared features highlights for the following fields:
Managed + Unmanaged Code
None of the imaging software can be 100% managed. Otherwise it will have significant performance problems. That's why all the high-performance imaging components for .NET are written by mixing managed .NET code with unmanaged code written in C/C++. Most companies implement mixing of managed and unmanaged code by writing wrapper .NET classes for COM components or common Windows DLLs. However this approach has an obvious disadvantage: it is vulnerable to the so-called "DLL Hell" problem which happens when different versions of the same component are installed on the same machine.
Graphics Mill for .NET implements a different approach. Written in the MC++ (Managed C++), it mixes managed and unmanaged C++ code in a single assembly. It means no .NET-foreign DLLs are distributed. So you do not need to register any DLLs or put them into system folders. You can deploy your applications with a simple xcopy and never have versioning problems. Also, since unmanaged code can be called inside the managed one without any platform interoperability, it has higher performance.
Another great feature of the unmanaged code in Graphics Mill for .NET is the possibility to use Assembler. Most speed-critical portions of code are written in Assembler with MMX optimization. It enables Graphics Mill to be much faster than other imaging toolkits which do not use such kind of optimization.