Image API/App which can perform image manipulation on the fly?

Do any of you know an API or application which can handle real time image manipulation?

Basically if I provided an image, this app would output perhaps a silhouetted version, or perform some other form of image manipulation, like roshak type blotting?

If you don't know of an application like this, do you know if this is possible using WPF?

I know some of you might respond with "hire someone" to do it. I basically want to determine how much work i开发者_开发技巧s involved prior to that. I'm an ASP.NET dev with no experience with WPF but if it's something that isn't extremely involved, I'd love to take a shot at it and get my WPF feet wet.

Thanks guys.

Pixel shaders, pixel shaders, pixel shaders.

WPF has built-in support for these since .NET 3.5, and from what I've seen it's not too tough to set them up. Not to mention there are tons of examples out there already.

You could look into GDI+ for any image transformation/filtering needs There are a number of tutorials out there, this series can get you going (5 parts):

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 1 - Per Pixel Filters

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 2 - Convolution Filters

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 3 - Edge Detection Filters

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 4 - Bilinear Filters and Resizing

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 5 - Displacement filters, including swirl

EDIT: WPF has quite a few Pixel Shaders, per Charlie's response below, that look good, wasn't aware of those as I haven't taken the WPF plunge yet.