MATLAB: overwriting images using print function - image

I'm using the print function in MATLAB to write images of plots, something like that
print(figure(1),'-dpng','-r300',filename);
But apparently the images are not overwritten, and the original images stay. I was using saveas before, which seems to overwrite the images, but print gives me more output options. Any ideas?
UPDATE: I ended up deleting the files before the printing with a different function.

You can use this:
im = frame2im(getframe(gcf,rec)); %Grabs image of plot as an image
imsave(im, filename); %save image
That syntax may not be 100%, its a while since I've used it.
Also be aware that this isn't perfect - I remember having issues with it grabbing a grey border around the edge of the plot. Also, I think the image may be based on a matlab screenshot.... just something to be aware of

Saving figures in matlab is rather troublesome, especially if the saved image should look like the original figure.
For myself i found the solution in using export_fig.
It's one of the most downloaded fileexchange files - maybe you should give it a try:
http://www.mathworks.de/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23629-export-fig
A small introduction to export_fig can be found at:
https://github.com/ojwoodford/export_fig/blob/master/README.md

Related

Images turning green-blackish when passing them to dataloaders

I'm working with fastai, trying to pass some images to a dataloader. The original images are kind of pinkish, but after passing them they appear mostly as green-black (see image in link below):
Original pinkish image (up) and example images (down) after passing them to dataloader, and the code.
The code I've used for the datablock and to show the images is:
example = DataBlock(
blocks=(ImageBlock, CategoryBlock),
get_items=get_image_files,
splitter=GrandparentSplitter(),
get_y=parent_label,
item_tfms=Resize(128)) #already tried it without item_tfms just in case, still black-green
dls = example.dataloaders(path)
dls.show_batch(nrows=1, ncols=3)
I tried with .tif and .jpeg images, and both show the same problem. The only thing that comes to my mind is that somewhat somewhere is not reading correctly the color format (RGB according to my original files), or maybe transforming it; but I'm not able to figure it out.
Just in case it's important, I'm working in a Jupyter notebook with a MackBook Air M1.
Thanks!
Irene

Matlab create image from array and save without displaying

Apologies if this is a dupe, I've been searching for over an hour but the search terms are all really broad and I just keep getting the same results. Also I'm fairly new to matlab so apologies for any misunderstandings.
Anywho, I have a matlab program which needs to frequently save an image generated from a matrix, but I just can't figure out how to do that without displaying it first. Basically I'm caught in between two functions, image and imwrite, both only do half of what I want.
image is able to take my matrix and create the desired output, but it just displays it to a figure window
imwrite is able to save an image to a file without displaying it, but the image is completely wrong and I can't find any parameters that would fix it.
Other questions I've seen deal with using imread and managing figures and stuff, but I'm just doing (for example)
matrix = rand(20);
colormap(winter);
image(matrix, 'CDataMapping', 'scaled');
or
matrix = rand(20);
imwrite(matrix, winter(256), 'filename.png');
Is there some way to call the image function such that it doesn't display a figure window and then gets saved to a file? Something analogous to calling imshow and then savefig in matplotlib.
Just do this:
matrix = rand(20);
f = figure('visible', 'off');
colormap(winter);
image(matrix, 'CDataMapping', 'scaled');
print(f, '-dpng', 'filename.png');

Matplotlib Plots Lose Transparency When Saving as .ps/.eps

I'm having an issue with attempting to save some plots with transparent ellipsoids on them if I attempt to save them with .ps/.eps extensions.
Here's the plot saved as a .png:
If I choose to save it as a .ps/.eps here is what it looks like:
How I got around this, was to use ImageMagick to convert the original png to a ps. The only problem is that the image in png format is about 90k, and it becomes just under 4M after conversion. This is not good since I have a lot of these images, and it will take too much time to compile my latex document. Does anyone have a solution to this?
The problem is that eps does not support transparencies natively.
There are few options:
rasterize the image and embed in a eps file (like #Molly suggests) or exporting to pdf and converting with some external tool (like gs) (which usually relies as well on rasterization)
'mimic' transparency, giving a colour that looks like the transparent one on a given background.
I discussed this for sure once on the matplotlib mailing list, and I got the suggestion to rasterize, which is not feasible as you get either pixellized or huge figures. And they don't scale very nicely when put into, e.g., a publication.
I personally use the second approach, and although not ideal, I found it good enough. I wrote a small python script that implements the algorithm from this SO post to obtain a solid RGB representation of a colour with a give transparency
EDIT
In the specific case of your plot try to use the zorder keyword to order the parts plotted. Try to use zorder=10 for the blue ellipse, zorder=11 for the green and zorder=12 for the hexbins.
This way the blue should be below everything, then the green ellipse and finally the hexbins. And the plot should be readable also with solid colors. And if you like the shades of blue and green that you have in png, you can try to play with mimic_alpha.py.
EDIT 2
If you are 100% sure that you have to use eps, there are a couple of workarounds that come to my mind (and that are definitely uglier than your plot):
Just draw the ellipse borders on top of the hexbins.
Get centre and amplitude of each hexagon, (possibly discard all zero bins) and make a scatter plot using the same colour map as in hexbin and adjusting the marker size and shape as you like. You might want to redraw the ellipses borders on top of that
Another alternative would be to save them to pdf
savefig('myfigure.pdf')
That works with pdflatex, if that was the reason why you needed to use eps and not svg.
You can rasterize the figure before saving it to preserve transparency in the eps file:
ax.set_rasterized(True)
plt.savefig('rasterized_fig.eps')
I had the same problem. To avoid rasterizing, you can save the image as a pdf and then run (on unixish systems at least) in a terminal:
pdftops -eps my.pdf my.eps
Which gives a .eps file as output.
I solved this by:
1) adding a set_rasterization_zorder(1) when defining the figure area:
fxsize=16
fysize=8
f = figure(num=None, figsize=(fxsize, fysize), dpi=180, facecolor='w',
edgecolor='k')
plt.subplots_adjust(
left = (18/25.4)/fxsize,
bottom = (13/25.4)/fysize,
right = 1 - (8/25.4)/fxsize,
top = 1 - (8/25.4)/fysize)
subplots_adjust(hspace=0,wspace=0.1)
#f.suptitle('An overall title', size=20)
gs0 = gridspec.GridSpec(1, 2)
gs11 = gridspec.GridSpecFromSubplotSpec(1, 1, subplot_spec=gs0[0])
ax110 = plt.Subplot(f, gs11[0,0])
f.add_subplot(ax110)
ax110.set_rasterization_zorder(1)
2) a zorder=0 in each alpha=anynumber in the plot:
ax110.scatter(xs1,ys1 , marker='o', color='gray' , s=1.5,zorder=0,alpha=0.3)#, label=label_bg)
and
3) finally a rasterized=True when saving:
P.savefig(str(PLOTFILENAME)+'.eps', rasterized=True)
Note that this may not work as expected with the transparent keyword to savefig because an RGBA colour with alpha<1 on transparent background will be rendered the same as the RGB colour with alpha=1.
As mentioned above, the best and easiest choice (if you do not want to loose resolution) is to rasterized the figure
f = plt.figure()
f.set_rasterized(True)
ax = f.add_subplot(111)
ax.set_rasterized(True)
f.savefig('figure_name.eps',rasterized=True,dpi=300)
This way, you can manage the size by dpi option as well. In fact, you can also play with the zorder below you want to apply the rasterization:
ax.set_rasterization_zorder(0)
Note: It is important to keep f.set_rasterized(True) when you use plt.subplot and plt.subplot2grid functions. Otherwise, label and tick area will not appear in the .eps file
My solution is to export the plot as .eps, load it up to Inkscape for example, then Ungroup the plot, select the object that I want to set the transparency and just edit the Opacity of the Fill in the "Fill and Stroke" tab.
You can save the file as .svg if you want to tweak it later, or export the image for a publication.
If you are writing the academic paper in latex, I would recommend you export the .pdf file rather than .eps. The .pdf format supports transparency perfectly and has good compression efficiency, and most importantly, can be easily edited in Adobe Illustrator.
If you wanna further edit the graph (NOT EDITING DATA! I MEAN, FOR GOOD-LOOKING), you could open the exported graph, in Adobe Acrobat - Edit - Copy elements into Adobe Illustrator. The two software can handle everything perfectly.
I work happily with this method. Everything clear, editable and small-size. Hope can help.

Matlab Image Processing

I'm facing a problem when displaying an image and using hold on to then plot hough lines on top of it. I want to store this image in a variable including lines on it and use it further. How can I do that?
You can use the copyobj for this. Or the getframe function if you're making a movie.

Blurred colors using epsfig or graphicx in LaTeX

My code is simple enough, and importing eps images is something I've done before with other matlab-generated content, but for one reason or another I end up with blurred colors in my heatmap when I use epsfig or graphicx to import it into my document. In the picture below, the right is what shows up if I compile to DVI and open up the document in Yap, and the left is if I simply view the eps in GSView.
alt text http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/1694/epsproblem.png
Here is my code. This example is using graphicx, but the idea is the same with epsfig.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/ngram3_model_raw.eps}
\caption{The perplexity when compared
against the HUB test set}
\end{figure}
Is there perhaps some option I am forgetting?
I had the same problem with DVI, but if I compiled to pdf the pictures were fine
What you see is bilinear interpolation. It is done by the viewer. Probably Matlab defines the plot contents as a pixmap (I guess you use imagesc?).
The solution is not straightforward. It may help to use a different processing chain (as WtFudgE pointed out) that will lead the data end up in a format where it is not interpolated anymore. You may also use a different viewer that does not interpolate and I would assume that a printer would also not interpolate. This can again be dependent of the application you print from.
Sorry that I don't have a solution for you; at least you now have some new words to search for in Google. ;)

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