Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Image Manipulation

Suppose you have an image and you would like to improve its appearance. You then need to access the individual pixels of the image and replace them with other pixels. Or perhaps you want to compute the pixels of an image from scratch, for example, to show the result of physical measurements or a mathematical computation. The BufferedImage class gives you control over the pixels in an image, and classes that implement the BufferedImageOp interface let you transform images.

This is a major change from the image support in JDK 1.0. At that time, the image classes were optimized to support incremental rendering. The original purpose of the classes was to render GIF and JPEG images that are downloaded from the Web, a scan line at ...