I'm working on a project and we'd like to have people be able to upload pictures of themselves and overlay them within certain predefined frames (ie clown, cowboy, hockey player). Does anyone have an idea how we would/should go about doing this? Thanks!
You still need help with this? Since you know you need a web service, this is simply a programming exercise dealing with two images. Most any means of creating the web service can be done with libraries that let you load and manipulate bitmaps easily enough - I know you can do it in .NET using the System.Drawing namespace. Size both images so they are the same. Assuming the person is being photographed at a greeen screen (or some other flat monochrome background), just take a sample of the upper corner of the person image and for every pixel in the person image that is reasonably close to that color, change it to the equivalent pixel in the background image. You will have to experiment to see what kind of range of background pixels you need to replace. And using this simple method you will probably have some fake-looking fringing around the person. There are techniques for dealing with that, but now you are getting into more complicated image processing.
Web service to overlay pictures? try new HTML5 canvas tag. If you don't care about the IE browser, the new HTML spec from the W3C - called HTML5 has a useful canvas tag. If you know a javascript and don't care about Microsoft this might be an interesting way to do it. Below are some links. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/canvas_tutorial http://thinkvitamin.com/code/how-to-draw-with-html-5-canvas/ http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_canvas.asp http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/the-canvas-element.html
if you are using php, it couldn´t be easier: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imagecopymerge.php just make sure the frame is in png format, with transparent background.
