Sometimes, we want to convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array with Python.

In this article, we’ll look at how to convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array with Python.

How to convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array with Python?

To convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array with Python, we call the Image.open method from PIL.

Next, we call convert with 'L' to convert that to an image object that we can pass into numpy.array.

Then we call numpy.array with the returned image object to return a NumPy array.

For instance, we write:

import numpy
from PIL import Image

img = Image.open("art.png").convert("L")
imgarr = numpy.array(img)
print(imgarr)

to call Image.open with the path to the image file.

Then we call convert with 'L' to return image object that we pass into numpy.array to generate the array and return it,

Therefore, imgarr is something like:

[[29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]
 [29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]
 [29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]
 ...
 [29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]
 [29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]
 [29 29 29 ... 29 29 29]]

Conclusion

To convert a PIL Image into a NumPy array with Python, we call the Image.open method from PIL.

Next, we call convert with 'L' to convert that to an image object that we can pass into numpy.array.

Then we call numpy.array with the returned image object to return a NumPy array.