Neodynamic ImageDraw SDK for .NET is the definitive solution for professional imaging tasks, exclusively designed for .NET developers. ImageDraw is a lightweight royalty-free .NET component (.NET DLL Class Library a.k.a. assembly) which lets you to easily add advanced Imaging Effects and Dynamic Image Composition to any .NET Framework-based applications.
ImageDraw allows you to create dynamic composite images with lots of useful built-in Imaging Effects like drop shadows, reflections, perspective views, Polaroid, filmstrip, scaling, resizing, skewing, and so on. ImageDraw supports image files, text like captions and watermarks, stylized texts a.k.a. WordArt, and AutoShapes such as lines and arrows, rectangles, ovals, polygons and stars.

The ImageDraw Object Model is very flexible and powerful. ImageDraw controls generate Dynamic Composite Images and the main characters in this scenario are Canvas and Elements.

The main characters of ImageDraw Composite Images

• Canvas is a rectangular area intended for drawing Image, Text, and Shape Elements. It plays a key role in the ImageDraw architecture because it governs and determines the final size for the output composite image to be generated.
• Elements are simple graphical objects which are assembled together to create a composite image. All elements are drawn on the Canvas in the order that each of them has in the stack of elements (the Elements property that each ImageDraw control features). In addition, each element can have associated to it zero or more imaging Actions that affect its appearance (more on this later).
  
  There are many kind of elements:
  • ImageElement which simply wraps an image or picture that must be drawn on the Canvas. Those images or pictures can be acquired from several sources such as a URL or path file, Base64 string, byte array, or System.Drawing.Image object.
  • TextElement which simply wraps a text string that must be drawn on the Canvas. TextElement objects are created by specifying some basic properties such as Text, Font, ForeColor, StrokeColor, etc. TextElement are useful for drawing custom captions and watermarks.
  • RichTextElement which render rich text by mixing words in different fonts, sizes, capitalizations, foreground colors, etc.
  • WordArtElement which are stylized texts with special effects featuring gradient color fills and shaping. WordArtElement objects are created by specifying some basic properties such as Text, Font, ForeFill, StrokeFill, WordArtShape, etc.
  • ShapeElement which are preset shapes like rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, stars, and polygons that can be drawn on the Canvas. AutoShapes support imaging effects, text inside them by allowing padding text feature, border roundness and dashed patterns.
  • ShapeElement which are preset shapes like rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, stars, polygon, callouts (a.k.a. speech bubbles) and paths that can be drawn on the Canvas. AutoShapes support imaging effects, text inside them by allowing padding text feature, border roundness and dashed patterns.

Most time, Element objects ((ImageElement, TextElement, WordArtElement, ShapeElement   RichTextElement) will require some "retouching" such as resizing, scaling, FX effects, etc. Actions are imaging effects that are applied on any Element objects. You can easily apply more than one Action on any elements. ImageDraw comes with 51 useful and impressive built-in ready to use Actions.

Some ImageDraw built-in imaging effects (Actions)

ImageDraw features XML Template i.e. you can instruct an ImageDraw object for exporting/importing the composite image in XML text formatting. By invoking a simple class method you can get a string representation of the Output Composite Image in XML format allowing you to save it in any kind of data source be it SQL Server Database, file on disk, and so on. In the same way, you can restore the Composite Image from a XML Template by just invoking a simple class method as well.

As stated before, ImageDraw architecture allows you to apply more than one Action on a given Element (ImageElement, TextElement, WordArtElement , ShapeElement and RichTextElement). The following figures show how some combination of Actions applied on an Element can improve its appearance.