How to get a rotated, zoomed and panned image from an UIImageView at its full resolution?

Question

I have an UIImageView which can be rotated, panned and scaled with gesture recognisers. As a result it is cropped in its enclosing view. Everything is worki

Answer 1

Why capturing the view if you have the original image? Just apply the transformations to it. Something like this may be a start:

UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"<# original #>"];

CIImage *cimage = [CIImage imageWithCGImage:image.CGImage];

// build the transform you want
CGAffineTransform t = CGAffineTransformIdentity;
CGFloat angle = [(NSNumber *)[self.faceImageView valueForKeyPath:@"layer.transform.rotation.z"] floatValue];
CGFloat scale = [(NSNumber *)[self.faceImageView valueForKeyPath:@"layer.transform.scale"] floatValue];    
t = CGAffineTransformConcat(t, CGAffineTransformMakeScale(scale, scale));
t = CGAffineTransformConcat(t, CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(-angle));

// create a new CIImage using the transform, crop, filters, etc.
CIImage *timage = [cimage imageByApplyingTransform:t];

// draw the result
CIContext *context = [CIContext contextWithOptions:nil];
CGImageRef imageRef = [context createCGImage:timage fromRect:[timage extent]];
UIImage *result = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:imageRef];

// save to disk
NSData *png = UIImagePNGRepresentation(result);
NSString *path = [NSHomeDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"Documents/result.png"];
if (png && [png writeToFile:path atomically:NO]) {
    NSLog(@"\n%@", path);
}
CGImageRelease(imageRef);

You can easily crop the output if that's what you want (see -[CIImage imageByCroppingToRect] or take into account the translation, apply a Core Image filter, etc. depending on what are your exact needs.