iOS: How to get a piece of a stretched image? - ios

Question

The generic problem I'm facing is this:
I have a stretchable 50x50 PNG. I'm stretching it to 300x100. I want to get three UIImages of size 100x100 cut from the stretched image, A, B & C in the picture below:
I'm trying to do it like this:
// stretchedImage is the 50x50 UIImage, abcImageView is the 300x100 UIImageView
UIImage *stretchedImage = [abcImageView.image stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:25 topCapHeight:25];
CGImageRef image = CGImageCreateWithImageInRect(stretchedImage.CGImage, bButton.frame);
UIImage *result = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:image];
[bButton setBackgroundImage:result forState:UIControlStateSelected];
CGImageRelease(image);
I'm trying to crop the middle 100 ("B") using CGImageCreateWithImageInRect, but this is not right, since stretchedImage is 50x50, not 300x100. How do I get the 300x100 image to crop from? If the original image was 300x100 there would be no problem, but then I would lose the advantage of stretchable image.
I guess to generalize the problem even more, the question would be as simple as: if you scale or stretch an image to a bigger image view, how do you get the scaled/stretched image?
Background for the specific task I'd like to apply the solution for (if you can come up with an alternative solution):
I'm trying to implement a UI that's similar to the one you see during a call in native iPhone call application: a plate containing buttons for mute, speaker, hold, etc. Some of them are toggle type buttons with a different background color for selected state.
I have two graphics for the whole plate, for non-selected and selected states. I'm stretching both images to the desired size. For the buttons in selected state I want to get a piece of the stretched selected graphic.

Answer 1

You should be able to do this by rendering abcImageView to a UIImage
UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(abcImageView.bounds.size, NO, 0.f);
[abcImageView.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];
UIImage *image = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
Then, you can crop the image like this (given cropRect):
CGImageRef cgImage = CGImageCreateWithImageInRect(image.CGImage, cropRect);
UIImage *croppedImage = [UIImage imageWithCGImage:cgImage];
// Do something with the image.
CGImageRelease(cgImage);