Save Image | OpenCV vs Pillow | Python

06 February, 2023

This part will show you the side-by-side comparisons of using OpenCV (cv2) and Pillow (PIL) to write/save images.

Save an Image

# Pillow
pil_img.save("new_image.jpg")

# OpenCV
cv2.imwrite("new_image.jpg", cv2_img)

You might also want to learn how to read images using cv2 and PIL.

from PIL import Image

# read images
pil_img = Image.open("test_images/test1.jpg")

# write images
pil_img.save("test_images/pil_image.jpg")

import cv2

# read images
cv2_img = cv2.imread("test_images/test1.jpg")

# write images
cv2.imwrite("test_images/cv2_image.jpg", cv2_img)

Image.save(fp, format=None, **params)

Parameters:

fp: A filename (string), pathlib.Path object or file object.
format: Optional format override. If omitted, the format to use is determined from the filename extension. This parameter should always be used if a file object is used instead of a filename.
params: Extra parameters to the image writer. See the documentation for available options for each writer.

Returns:

cv2.imwrite(filename, img[, params])

Parameters:

filename: Name of the file.
img: Image or Images to be saved (Numpy array).
params: Format-specific parameters encoded as pairs (paramId_1, paramValue_1, paramId_2, paramValue_2, … .) see cv::ImwriteFlags.

Returns: