Image Manipulation in Golang - Convert Image to Grayscale

One of the things I love about Go is its powerful collection of standard libraries, one of those is the image library. I’ll show you how you can have a fun exercise or a weekend project in Go, that’ll convert an image to grayscale (or kinda black and white). This tutorial will help you learn standard image library or if you’re new to Go it’ll teach you some basic concepts of Go.

First thing first, create a file greyjoy.go, I mean, why not Greyjoy? We’re having joy/fun with grey. Paste the following code in the file.

   
package main

import (  
    "os"; "image"; "image/jpeg"; "image/color"  
    "path/filepath"; "fmt"; "log"; "strings"  
)

func check(err error) {  
    if err != nil {  
        panic(err)  
    }  
}

func main() {  
    // : All your code will go here  
}

Our code will compile to a binary file, and we will call it like greyjoy firas.jpg and it’ll save the grayscale version as firas_gray.jpg.

So let’s get the first argument passed to our binary and if it’s not given then exit with a message. Again all of these code will go under the main func above.

   
if len(os.Args) < 2 {
    log.Fatalln("Image path is required") 
}
imgPath := os.Args[1]

Let’s open the given file, check any error and instruct Go to close the file when we’re done.

  f, err := os.Open(imgPath) check(err) defer f.Close()

Cool, we’ve the image decoded in the img variable and its pixel are ready to be read, however it’s readonly, means we can’t manipulate this img.
So, let’s create a blank image where we can write:

We will get the size of the given image and we will create a blank RGBA image with the same size (X and Y coordinates).

   
    size := img.Bounds().Size()  
    rect := image.Rect(0, 0, size.X, size.Y)  
    wImg := image.NewRGBA(rect)

Now we will loop through all the pixels in img, get the pixel, make it gray by applying a simple grayscale algorithm and write that pixel to wImg.

   
    // loop though all the x  
    for x := 0; x < size.X; x++ { 
        // and now loop thorough all of this x's y 
        for y := 0; y < size.Y; y++ { 
            pixel := img.At(x, y) 
            originalColor := color.RGBAModel.Convert(pixel).
                (color.RGBA) 
            // Offset colors a little, adjust it to your taste 
            r := float64(originalColor.R) * 0.92126 
            g := float64(originalColor.G) * 0.97152 
            b := float64(originalColor.B) * 0.90722 
            // average 
            grey := uint8((r + g + b) / 3) 
            c := color.RGBA{ 
                R: grey, G: grey, B: grey, A: originalColor.A, 
            } 
            wImg.Set(x, y, c) 
        } 
    }

Let’s simply encode wImg and save it to disk with the same name that was given but we will suffix it by _gray.

   
ext := filepath.Ext(imgPath)  
name := strings.TrimSuffix(filepath.Base(imgPath), ext)  
newImagePath := fmt.Sprintf("%s/%s_gray%s", filepath.Dir(imgPath), name, ext)  
fg, err := os.Create(newImagePath)  
defer fg.Close()  
check(err)  
err = jpeg.Encode(fg, wImg, nil)  
check(err)

Now we will build our binary by running this in the command line:

   
go build

and it’ll create a binary called greyjoy. Now let’s run this binary and provide the input image path, it’ll output the gray image in the same path.

   
./greyjoy firas.jpg

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!