accessing pixels in an image - histograms help?

hi everyone, I have a question regarding images. I was hoping to create a program that looks at the pixel values in images sort of like a histogram. Anyway in my mind (im not a great programmer and this will probably be wrong I imagined it just being like reading a text file character by character only i would read an image pixel by pixel reading each ones value as i go along. Could it really be as simple as this? If anyone can point me in a starting direction i would much appreciate it or even websites i could possibly look at to research this?


thanks

Sure, you can read a binary file and look at the bytes if you know the image format. You can probably find an image processing library to help.

> Could it really be as simple as this?
For certain kinds of BMP files, yes it can be that simple.

But for things like say PNG, you should use a library to get the pixels for you.

For jpeg images, there are jpeg libraries available from various source.

Windows is also capable of dealing with a fair number of image formats natively, such as BMP, JPEG, PNG - once you have loaded the image with LoadImage(), the pixels are available to you (using the relevant GDI functions).

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Mats