Burn Text Onto 16bpp Grayscale Images and Retain Color Information (Updated)

A common need in medical imaging is to burn text onto the image.  Commonly this is just a simple, white "L", "R", "A", etc. to denote anatomical direction.  We have annotations that make it easy to create and burn text onto images, however, we use GDI+ under the hood so it will not work on 12/16 bpp grayscale images and must be converted up to 24bpp.  When you do this, the color information is lost and you can no longer window level properly.

The workaround for this is to make a copy of the image, fill it with all black, burn the white text annotation onto it, then combine just the white text onto the original image.  I've attached a simple C# 2005 project using LEADTOOLS 16.5's .NET interface that shows how to do this.

The attached project has been updated for version 17. The project has also been modified to add editable AnnTextObjects to the Medical Viewer's Annotation Container before realizing.

The attached project has been updated for version 18 of LEADTOOLS, it has also been modified to save the image to disk with the realized annotations.

The attached project has been updated to a Visual Studio 2017 project targeting LEADTOOLS 19. It has also been modified to realized annotations without the use of a secondary viewer.