Chapter 3. Enhancing Images

In the previous chapter, we learned a lot about day-to-day image processing. We accomplished the learning objective of performing basic image manipulation by working on several examples and small projects. In this chapter, we will move a step further by learning how to add special effects to an image. The special effects added to the image serve several purposes. These not only give a pleasing appearance to the image but may also help you to understand important information presented by the image.

In this chapter, we shall:

• Learn how to adjust brightness and contrast levels of an image
• Add code to selectively modify the color of an image and create gray scale images and negatives
• Use PIL functionality to combine two images together and add transparency effects to the image
• Apply various image-enhancement filters to an image to achieve effects such as smoothing, sharpening, embossing, and so on
• Undertake a project to develop a tool to add a watermark or text or a date stamp to an image

So let's get on with it.