Image manipulation

Hi if anyone could help I’d be very grateful. Last time I did a program was on a zx spectrum over 30 years ago. Anyway, got Codea last week and loving it.
Q.1 Is there anyway to take a snap shot of a defined area of the screen and use that as an image? As this would be a last resort to solve Q.2
Q.2 The sprite function allows me to resize a photograph imported from “Documents” whilst putting it on screen, but I want to resize, overlay another image from documents and then save this as a new image to documents for use later on…all obviously without it being shown. I can’t seem to achieve this using any combination of image commands, setContext and sprite.
Many thanks

@TheAbstractMan
Q1. Instead of writing to the screen, you can do

function setup()
    screen = image(WIDTH, HEIGHT)
end

this would create and image to draw on, you can then do

function draw()
    -- this puts the drawing area to the screen image
    setContext(screen)
    -- all the draw code

    -- this resets the canvas to draw on the the ipad screen
    setContext()

    -- to make sure the image renders on the right place
    spriteMode(CENTER)
    sprite(screen, WIDTH/2, HEIGHT/2)

end

if you then want to capture a certain area, you can do

    capturedImage = screen:copy(x, y, width, height)
    -- x and y are the coordinates of the area you want to capture, width and height speak for themselves

Wonderful - exactly what I was attempting…and I can see where I went wrong. Many thanks.

@TheAbstractMan - there are quite a few people in this forum of your vintage, so don’t feel out of place.

Welcome.

Cheers, and thanks for your intro manuals etc on the web - I read through them all. Very helpful.

One further question: obviously it would slow the program down but is it possible to have the above code running simultaneously with what’s going on on screen so in effect you have a running screen and a virtual copy of the screen?

@TheAbstractMan what do you mean exactly? Like have a virtual copy of the current frame?

I think you can just store it into a second var like

virtual = screen

@TheAbstractMan, sure, just add sprite(screen, WIDTH / 2, HEIGHT /2) (as @stevon8ter said) at the end of draw

Yes a virtual copy of the frame…my thought is that if we create a virtual canvas which is what you are doing with the screen = image (…) bit at the top. We are then drawing or whatever on that canvas. Whatever is drawn on the canvas we can then pass to the real screen, which is what your code is doing with sprite(screen…) …I guess I’m still on about my original question 1 above. I.e. reversing this process and simply capturing the current real screen as an image…as if this can be done then you have in effect a virtual copy which at any point can be manipulated independently.

@TheAbstractMan

well the screen image doesn’t change, (unless you change it, as done by overdrawing it in draw)

so you can basicly just save it into another var when you need it to capture the screen