GTK & GDK

The Gimp Tool Kit [GTK], is a popular GUI programming library omnipresent in the world of free software.It helps us make windows, user interfaces like dialogs, buttons, menus and a plethora of features. Here however, we will focus on the ease of loading, manipulating and displaying images or pictures present in various formats using the GTK toolkit's drawing libraries called Graphics Drawing Kit [GDK]. Though it would be very tempting to introduce GTK right now, its left to the reader to pursue his/her curiosity to learn GTK.

The outline of what we Will do is this; we use the GDK library to load images and then get the pixel buffer of the image, and manipulate it. Afterwards we make this image into a GTK widget and display it on the screen. Just three simple steps;

• load,
• process,
• display.

Presto! Welcome to Image Processing.