Python Pillow - Overview

In today’s digital world, we come across lots of digital images. In case, we are working with Python programming language, it provides lot of image processing libraries to add image processing capabilities to digital images.

Some of the most common image processing libraries are: OpenCV, Python Imaging Library (PIL), Scikit-image, Pillow. However, in this tutorial, we are only focusing on Pillow module and will try to explore various capabilities of this module.

Pillow is built on top of PIL (Python Image Library). PIL is one of the important modules for image processing in Python. However, the PIL module is not supported since 2011 and doesn’t support python 3.

Pillow module gives more functionalities, runs on all major operating system and support for python 3. It supports wide variety of images such as “jpeg”, “png”, “bmp”, “gif”, “ppm”, “tiff”. You can do almost anything on digital images using pillow module. Apart from basic image processing functionality, including point operations, filtering images using built-in convolution kernels, and color space conversions.

Image Archives

The Python Imaging Library is best suited for image archival and batch processing applications. Python pillow package can be used for creating thumbnails, converting from one format to another and print images, etc.

Image Display

You can display images using Tk PhotoImage, BitmapImage and Windows DIB interface, which can be used with PythonWin and other Windows-based toolkits and many other Graphical User Interface (GUI) toolkits.

For debugging purposes, there is a show () method to save the image to disk which calls the external display utility.

Image Processing

The Pillow library contains all the basic image processing functionality. You can do image resizing, rotation and transformation.

Pillow module allows you to pull some statistics data out of image using histogram method, which later can be used for statistical analysis and automatic contrast enhancement.