We've done a few tutorials about image editing with C#. We're going to continue the series with a tutorial on how to convert a color image to black and white. This tutorial will show three different ways to convert an image to grayscale - starting with the easiest and slowest.

You're probably wondering why you would want to see multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. It's hard to predict what technique will work best for everyone's application, so I've decided to outline several different possibilities.

Below is the image I used to test each algorithm and to benchmark their performance. The image can be downloaded free from Gaming Textures. The conversion times listed were obtained using my computer so your times might be different.

Original color image	Image converted to black and white

1. Slow and Simple
Convert Time: 1,135ms

The first method I'm going to show you is by far the easiest to understand and implement. Unfortunately, it's also the slowest.


This code looks at every pixel in the original image and sets the same pixel in the new bitmap to a grayscale version. You can probably figure out why this is so slow. If the image is 2048x2048, this code will call GetPixel and SetPixel over 4 million times. Those functions aren't the most efficient way to get pixel data from the image.

You might be wondering where the numbers .3, .59, and .11 came from. In reality, you could just take the average color by adding up R, G, B and dividing by three. In fact, you'll get a pretty good black and white image by doing that. However, at some point, someone a lot smarter than me figured out that these numbers better approximate the human eye's sensitivity to each of those colors. The Wikipedia article on grayscale has some pretty good information about that.

This method will work fine for small images or when you don't really care about how long it takes to convert it to black and white. If you need it done quickly, I would recommend one of the next two methods.

2. Faster and Complicated
Convert Time: 188ms

The next technique I'm going to show you is based on the previous one, but much faster. It still iterates through every pixel, but we're going to utilize C#'s unsafe keyword to make getting the pixel data much more efficient.


There's a lot of code here so let's go through it piece by piece. The first thing we need to do is lock the bits in the Bitmap objects. Locking the bits keeps the .NET runtime from moving them around in memory. This is important because we're going to use a pointer, and if the data is moving around the pointer won't point to the correct thing anymore. You'll need to know the pixel format of the image you're trying to convert. I'm using jpeg's, which are 24 bits per pixel. There is a way to get the pixel format from an image, but that's outside the scope of this tutorial. The integer, pixelSize, is the number of bytes per pixel in your original image. Since my images were 24 bits per pixel, that translates to 3 bytes per pixel.

To get pixel data, I start by getting the address to the first pixel in each row of the image. Scan0 returns the address of the first pixel in the image. So in order to get the address of the first pixel in the row, we have to add the number of bytes in the row, Stride, multiplied by the row number, y. Below is a diagram that might help you understand this a little better.


Now we can get color data straight from memory by accessing it like an array. The byte at x * pixelSize will be the blue, x * pixelSize + 1 is green, and x * pixelSize + 2 is red. This is why pixelSize is very important. If the image you provided is not 3 bytes per pixel, you'll be pulling color data from the wrong location in memory.

Next, make the grayscale version using the same process as the previous method and set the exact same pixel in the new image. All that's left to do is to unlock the bitmaps and return the new image.

3. Short and Sweet
Convert Time: 62ms

The last method is probably the best way. It's faster than the previous two methods and uses much less code. This technique uses a ColorMatrix to perform the conversion. A ColorMatrix is a 5x5 matrix that can make just about any modifications to the color of an image. A ColorMatrix is pretty complicated and deserves a whole tutorial to itself. For now, if you want more information about it, you'll have to do the research yourself.


This time we're going to use GDI to draw the new black and white image. The benefit of this technique over the last one is that we don't need to know any information about the image's pixel format. The code here is pretty straight forward. First create the blank image and get a Graphics object from it. Next, create the ColorMatrix that will convert the original image to grayscale. Declare an ImageAttributes object that will use the ColorMatrix and use it to draw the new image using DrawImage.

That's it for converting an image to grayscale using C# and .NET. Hopefully one of the above techniques will work for your application. Leave us a comment if you've got questions or anything else to say.