Move System.Drawing.Rectangle to a different area on Screen - c#

I am creating a screen capture & crop utility using answer posted here
The code draws a rectangle (System.Drawing.Rectangle) on the screen and saves a cropped image.
I need to make this rectangle movable to a different area on the screen without changing the size.
How can I achieve this?
What did not work for me?
I tried this codeproject article, works very good to move controls on the screen.
For this code to work correctly I would need to draw rectangle on a container control.
Which container can be used to wrapping?
Being a succesful web developer I used to think that I can write for WinForms also... I was wrong :-( Some help would be much appreciated!

In C# Windows Forms to change the location of a rectangle you do the following
rect.Location = new Location(x,y);
Where x and y are the coordinates (relative to the window's origin) that you want to move it to.
Here's a link to The MSDN Page on System.Drawing.Rectangle

Related

Cropping a Bitmap to an Area of Interest

Similar to my previous question which I as yet have not solved (Comparing Frames of a live Feed) I have another issue.
Scenario
I have an image taken by a camera that contains a rectangle in it. I need to crop the image to only show the rectangle plus a small margin.
My Efforts
I have accomplished this by iterating through the pixels using LockBits and attempting to find potential edges but these seems terribly slow and inefficient
My Thoughts
I was thinking I could take an empty image as a baseline and then remove the differences between the two, however I cannot be sure that the lighting will be exactly the same and that potential contaminants such as an accidental fly getting into the image will not be present which could muck up this process.
Is there any easier way? The rectangle should (usually) be in the bottom left corner, but not always (long story) but this cant be relied upon.
My Environment
Visual Studio 2012 (2010 if neccessary is available)
Ueye camera
C#
The images are of type System.Drawing.Bitmap
The rectangle will often be something like a credit card or an ID card or anything of a similar size and shape
The empty image (background) looks like this:
Using EmguCV you can detect shapes such as a rectangle. Click here for the emgu code. Once you have detected the rectangle it is fairly easy to crop it out using a new Bitmap with the size of the rectangle.
The sample demonstrates how to crop the image from specific Picturebox control into destination Picturebox control using mouse selection or specified coordinates.
1.How to use mouse to select an area (rectangle) in a Picturebox control.
2.How to crop the image by the rectangle.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/CSWinFormCropImage-d4beb1fa

How to draw a Rectangle around the Window? (When I know its handle)

The effect that I want is:
Yeah.. it is similar effect in spy..
It works perfectly when I am doing this on controls inside the WindowForm
or WindowForm that does not have a borderstyle.
However, when it comes to a WindowForm that has a FormBorder,
it FAILS! The rectangle forms inside the form:
For drawing the rectangle, I used the source from CodeProject.
As mentioned in an earlier comment, you can just draw on the desktop using the GetDesktopWindow() API.

Set image offset of ImageBrush?

I've got a large image in memory which I convert to an System.Windows.Media.ImageBrush and use it as the Fill for a System.Windows.Shapes.Rectangle. You can move this rectangle around with your cursor.
Basically I want to use the rectangle as a "viewport". Thus I need to change which parts of the image get displayed within the rectangle, i.e., define a rectangular subsection of the image.
How can I do that?
I see ImageBrush.Viewport but that doesn't seem to mean the same thing.
I'm open to alternative solutions that don't involve a rectangle, such as drawing directly on a canvas or something, but AFAIK WPF doesn't let you access pixel data directly (at least not easily).
To achieve this your going to have to create your own rectangle user control to allow the user to create/resize a rectangle. Then I would create a CroppedBitmap of the image in the rectangle portion Cropped Bitmap MSDN Stackoverflow example
Edit
No, no, no #Mark, You dont turn the CroppedBitmap into a UserControl. You create a USerControl that exposed the CroppedBitmap. Basically, you create a UserControl with the following DependencyProperties
The Image
The Width of he cropped portion
The Height of the cropped portion
The Left of the cropped portion
Top of the cropped portion
Then as soon as any of these properties your DP callback will do a RenderTargetBitmap Crop of the new region.

How do I get the dimensions of the ImageRectangle in PictureBox?

Background
I want to be able to get the drawn dimensions of a zoomed image inside the picturebox (I'll explain below).
The PictureBox.ImageRectangle property seems to be exactly what I'm looking for because it shows the height and width of the resized image, as well as it's relative top, left position inside the control.
The trouble is PictureBox.ImageRectangle is private and so I can't read the values without using reflection (which is obviously not ideal).
Actual Question
My question is, is there another way that I can easily get to these values without writing a method to calculate what the values "ought" to be? I can do that easily enough, but I feel I'd be reinventing the wheel.
Context:
I'm writing a simple image processing app in C# and one of the things it has to do is allow the user to draw a selection around a portion of the image (a lot like the Marquee tool in Photoshop).
I need to know the dimensions of the rendered image so I know where to set the bounds of my marquee tool and also to translate the values of the drawn rectangle to points on the scaled bitmap inside the control.
My answer look simple so maybe I'm missing something, but I think Control.DisplayRectangle suits your need.
EDIT
OK, missed the point; however see How to get the value of non- public members of picturebox?
if you want to access dimension of the image in picture box you can use
GraphicsUnit units = GraphicsUnit.Point;
RectangleF imgRectangleF = pictureBox1.Image.GetBounds(ref units);
Rectangle imgRectangle = Rectangle.Round(imgRectangleF);

Showing image / text on screen without forms in c#

How can I show something on screen wihtout using forms?
Actually, I want to show some text and images popping on screen.
EDIT: just like i said HERE
What you can do is to create a alphatransparent form that draws the PNG and position it at the correct location and bind move etc.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI-plus/perpxalpha_sharp.aspx
PerPixelAlphaForm transparentImageForm = new PerPixelAlphaForm();
transparentImageForm.SetBitmap(<IMAGE GOES HERE>,<OPACITY GOES HERE>);
//opacity is the opacity that the image will be drawn with, a value of 255 = all transparent parts will be alpha/transparent just as much as the original PNG etc..
and you can put a timer that calls SetBitmap and changes the Opacity to fade in/out the image on the screen
And you can generate the text (on the fly) in a nice way with code from THIS article
and pass that image to the SetBitmap of the AlphaTransparent form.
EDIT: OR GO TO WPF.
I don't think you can: a form is equivalent to a window, and Windows applications draw into a window and not directly onto the screen (unless perhaps it's the backgroun/wallpaper, which I don't know about).
I think that's overdoing it but XNA will allow you to draw to the screen, but it is meant to be used for games so you will have trouble fitting it to a normal application.

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