suggestion with program design - jpeg file interpreter

I'm trying to come up with a way to easily measure the surface area of a leaf. It occurred to me that I could scan the leaf and then count the number of pixels in the image. I have a scanner that will produce a jpeg file.

Any suggestion for how to turn that file into something that would be "countable"?

Thanks,
Ken

How would you want to count the leaf? Colors? Angles? It's possible, but if you do snowflakes, then none are the same...

I would be scanning a dark image against a white background so I think I could just count anything that was non-white (or some other measure of non-whiteness). The scanner is pretty good at identifying forground from background when cropping the image. In that way I could equate the image width in pixels to the measured width of the leaf. That would give me a conversion factor from pixels to inches and total pixels to inches squared.

I just reread your post and see that I didn't quite answer it. I would want to count the number of "dark" pixels in the image.

If you load the image into a PictureBox, it will then have accessible pixels that you can iterate through. You can also load it into an StdPicture object, then create a memory DC. Either way, the GetPixel API will retrieve the color of any pixel.

Thanks! that should work!