Set BufferedImage alpha mask in Java

Question

I have two BufferedImages I loaded in from pngs. The first contains an image, the second an alpha mask for the image.

I want to create a combined image from the two,

Answer 1

Your solution could be improved by fetching the RGB data more than one pixel at a time(see http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/image/BufferedImage.html), and by not creating three Color objects on every iteration of the inner loop.

final int width = image.getWidth();
int[] imgData = new int[width];
int[] maskData = new int[width];

for (int y = 0; y < image.getHeight(); y++) {
    // fetch a line of data from each image
    image.getRGB(0, y, width, 1, imgData, 0, 1);
    mask.getRGB(0, y, width, 1, maskData, 0, 1);
    // apply the mask
    for (int x = 0; x < width; x++) {
        int color = imgData[x] & 0x00FFFFFF; // mask away any alpha present
        int maskColor = (maskData[x] & 0x00FF0000) << 8; // shift red into alpha bits
        color |= maskColor;
        imgData[x] = color;
    }
    // replace the data
    image.setRGB(0, y, width, 1, imgData, 0, 1);
}