How to achieve high quality cropped images from canvas? - image

Question

I am desperately searching for a good cropping tool. There are a bunch out there, for example:
Croppic
Cropit
Jcrop
The most important thing that I am trying to find is a cropping tool, that crops images without making the cropped image low in resolution. You can hack this by using the canvas tag by resizing the image. This way the image itself stays native, only the representation is smaller.
DarkroomJS was also something near the solution, but, unfortunately, the downloaded demo did not work. I'll try to figure out whats wrong. Does someone know some great alternatives, or how to get the cropped images in...let's say "native" resolution?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You are relying on the cropping tool to provide an interface for the users. the problem is that the image returned is sized to the interface and not the original image. Rather than me sifting through the various API's to see if they provide some way of controlling this behaviour (I assume at least some of them would) and because it is such a simple procedure I will show how to crop the image manually.
To use JCrop as an example
Jcrop provides various events for cropstart, cropmove, cropend... You can add a listener to listen to these events and keep a copy of the current cropping interface state
var currentCrop;
jQuery('#target').on('cropstart cropmove cropend',function(e,s,crop){
currentCrop = crop;
}
I don't know where you have set the interface size and I am assuming the events return the crop details at the interface scale
var interfaceSize = { //you will have to work this out
w : ?,
h : ?.
}
Your original image
var myImage = new Image(); // Assume you know how to load
So when the crop button is clicked you can create the new image by scaling the crop details back to the original image size, creating a canvas at the cropped size, drawing the image so that the cropped area is corectly positioned and returning the canvas as is or as a new image.
// image = image to crop
// crop = the current cropping region
// interfaceSize = the size of the full image in the interface
// returns a new cropped image at full res
function myCrop(image,crop,interfaceSize){
var scaleX = image.width / interfaceSize.w; // get x scale
var scaleY = image.height / interfaceSize.h; // get y scale
// get full res crop region. rounding to pixels
var x = Math.round(crop.x * scaleX);
var y = Math.round(crop.y * scaleY);
var w = Math.round(crop.w * scaleX);
var h = Math.round(crop.h * scaleY);
// Assume crop will never pad
// create an drawable image
var croppedImage = document.createElement("canvas");
croppedImage.width = w;
croppedImage.height = h;
var ctx = croppedImage.getContext("2d");
// draw the image offset so the it is correctly cropped
ctx.drawImage(image,-x,-y);
return croppedImage
}
You then only need to call this function when the crop button is clicked
var croppedImage;
myButtonElement.onclick = function(){
if(currentCrop !== undefined){ // ensure that there is a selected crop
croppedImage = myCrop(myImage,currentCrop,interfaceSize);
}
}
You can convert the image to a dataURL for download, and upload via
imageData = croppedImage.toDataURL(mimeType,quality) // quality is optional and only for "image/jpeg" images