MATLAB <---> Image editor with support for layers

Question

I was wondering if anybody knows of an API, toolbox, or library that extracts layers from an image format that is supported by a free editor such as Paint.NET (native format: .pdn)

Motivation: An interface to an image with layers that can be edited in a free image editor would be of interest for those of us who do computer vision and machine learning in MATLAB. For example, it could facilitate the automatic collection of manual pixel annotations for supervised learning.

Answer 1

Almost nothing can read a .pdn file. http://extension.nirsoft.net/pdn

So, you are left with the following options.

1. Use GIMP to read in the file, and export it into something matlab supports: http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/ref/imread.html.
2. Use GIMP to read in the file, and export it into something ImageMagick supports:http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php and then convert it into something matlab supports.
3. Export the data from Paint.NET into a matlab friendly format.

Note, the Matlab links are for the image processing toolbox, if you don't have that, the options are more limited.

Answer 2

I suggest using the .PSD Photoshop file format, which has layers support and is also implemented by many non-Adobe applications.

The PSD plugin for Paint.NET allows you to open and save PSD images: http://www.psdplugin.com/

You can then use Imagemagick to extract the layers to a format that MATLAB can read:

convert filename.psd filename-%d.png